The record of the next three and a half years of Melville’s life is extremely scant. What he was doing and thinking and feeling must be left almost completely to surmise. In the brief record of his life preserved in the Commonplace Book of his wife, this period between Liverpool and the South Seas is dismissed in a single sentence: “Taught school at intervals in Pittsfield and in Greenbush (now East Albany) N. Y.” Arthur Stedman (who got his facts largely from Mrs. Melville), in his “Biographical and Critical Introduction” to Typee, slightly enlarges upon this statement. “A good part of the succeeding three years, from 1837 to 1840,” says Stedman, “was occupied with school teaching. While so engaged at Greenbush, now East Albany, N. Y., he received the munificent salary of ‘six dollars a quarter and board.’ He taught for one term at Pittsfield, Mass., ‘boarding around’ with the families of his pupils, in true American fashion, and early suppressing, on one memorable occasion, the efforts of his larger scholars to inaugurate a rebellion by physical force.” J. E. A. Smith, in his Biographical Sketch already cited, dates this “memorable” mating of pedagogy and pugilism somewhat earlier.

Besides teaching during these years, Melville was engaged in another activity, which all of his biographers—if they knew of it at all—pass over in decent silence: an activity to which Melville devotes a whole book of Pierre.

“It still remains to be said,” says Melville, “that Pierre himself had written many a fugitive thing, which had brought him not only vast credit and compliments from his more immediate acquaintances, but the less partial applauses of the always intelligent and extremely discriminating public. In short, Pierre had frequently done that which many other boys have done—published. Not in the imposing form of a book, but in the more modest and becoming way of occasional contributions to magazines and other polite periodicals. Not only the public had applauded his gemmed little sketches of thought and fancy; but the high and mighty Campbell clan of editors of all sorts had bestowed upon them those generous commendations which, with one instantaneous glance, they had immediately perceived was his due.... One, after endorsingly quoting that sapient, suppressed maxim of Dr. Goldsmith’s, which asserts that whatever is new is false, went on to apply it to the excellent productions before him; concluding with this: ‘He has translated the unruffled gentleman from the drawing-room into the general levee of letters; he never permits himself to astonish; is never betrayed into anything coarse or new; as assured that whatever astonishes is vulgar, and whatever is new must be crude. Yes, it is the glory of this admirable young author, that vulgarity and vigour—two inseparable adjuncts—are equally removed from him.’”

In Pierre, Melville spends more than twenty-five closely printed pages—half satirical, half of the utmost seriousness—discussing his own literary growth: a passage of the highest critical and biographical interest. In its satirical parts the passage is consistently double-edged; therein, Melville ironically praises his early writing for possessing those very defects which his maturer work was damned for not exhibiting. It is doubtless true that his juvenile works were “equally removed from vulgarity and vigour.” They were “characterised throughout by Perfect Taste,” as he makes one critic observe “in an ungovernable burst of admiring fury.” But the Perfect Taste was the Perfect Taste of Hannah More, and Dr. Akenside, and Lalla Rookh. With the publication of Typee, Melville was charged not only with the crimes of vulgarity and vigour, but with the milder accompanying vices of indecency and irreverence. His earliest writings were untouched by any of these taints. In Pierre, Melville speaks of “a renowned clerical and philological conductor of a weekly religious periodical, whose surprising proficiency in the Greek, Hebrew and Chaldaic, to which he had devoted by far the greater part of his life, peculiarly fitting him to pronounce unerring judgment upon works of taste in the English.” Melville makes this critic thus deliver himself on Pierre’s early efforts in letters: “He is blameless in morals, and harmless throughout.” Another “unhesitatingly recommended his effusions to the family circle.” A third had no reserve in saying that “the predominant end and aim of this writer was evangelical piety.” Melville is here patently satirising the vitriolic abuse which Typee and Omoo provoked.

Only two of Melville’s earliest effusions, written before the world had “fairly Timonised him” are known to survive. These appeared in The Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser for May 4, and May 18, 1839. The first is signed “L. A. V.”; the second, known to exist only in a single mutilated clipping, in lacking the closing paragraphs, can give no evidence as to concluding signature. Copies of these two articles are preserved among Melville’s papers, each autographed by him in faded brown ink. The interest of the earlier paper is heightened by this inscription, in Melville’s hand, boldly scrawled across the inner margin: “When I woke up this morning, what the Devil should I see but your cane along in bed with me. I shall keep it for you when you come up here again.” It is more easy to imagine Melville’s astonishment in waking to find such a stately novelty as a walking-stick for a bed-fellow, than to fancy how the walking-stick found itself in such an unusual environment. It is about as futile to inquire into the history and meaning of this incident as soberly to debate “what songs the sirens sang and what name Achilles bore among the daughters of the King of Scyros.” It is certain, however, that the Sirens had little hand in Melville’s juvenile effusions. And of this fact Melville grew to be keenly aware. “In sober earnest,” he says in Pierre, “those papers contained nothing uncommon; indeed, those fugitive things were the veriest commonplace.” Yet as the initial literary efforts of a man who wrote Typee and Moby-Dick they are intensely interesting: interesting, like the longer prayers of St. Augustine, less because of their content than because of the personality from which they were derived.

What would seem to be Melville’s first published venture in letters is here given, nearly complete.

These “chaste and elegant sentiments” are, surely, “embellished with every polite accomplishment.” Melville called down the Nine Gods, and a host of minor deities; he ransacked Athens, Rhodes, Cyprus, Circassia, Lydia, Lilliputia, Damascus, this world and the next, for geographical adornments; he called up Burton, Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, Milton, Coleridge and Chesterfield, as well as Prometheus and Cinderella, Mahomet and Cleopatra, Madonnas and Houris, Medici and Mussulman, to strew carelessly across his pages. “Not in vain,” says Melville of the idealisation of himself in the character of Pierre, “had he spent long summer afternoons in the deep recesses of his father’s fastidiously picked and decorous library.” Not in vain, either, had he been submitted to three years of elementary drill in the classics at the Albany Academy. “Not that as yet his young and immature soul had been accosted by the wonderful Mutes, and through the vast halls of Silent Truth, had been ushered into the full, secret, eternally inviolable Sanhedrim, where the Poetic Magi discuss, in glorious gibberish, the Alpha and Omega of the Universe,” says Melville; “but among the beautiful imaginings of the second and third degree of poets he freely and comprehendingly ranged.” Melville was always a wide if desultory reader, more and more interested after the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, and the Burton with reference to whom he began his career in letters, in “remote and curious illusions, wrecks of forgotten fables, antediluvian computations, obsolete and unfamiliar problems, riddles that no living Œdipus would care to solve.” And this preoccupation—first made manifest in Mardi (1849)—must always stand in the way of his most typical writings ever becoming widely popular. His earliest known piece of juvenile composition is interesting as revealing the crude beginnings of one of the manners superbly mastered in parts of Moby-Dick. This early effusion, by revealing so crudely the defects of his qualities, reads as a dull parody of one of his most typical later manners.

With a Miltonic confidence in his own gifts, Melville came to view these earlier pieces as the first “earthly rubbish” of his “immense quarries of fine marble.” Melville goes on to say that “no commonplace is ever effectually got rid of, except by essentially emptying one’s self of it into a book; for once trapped into a book, then the book can be put into the fire and all will be well.” “But they are not always put into the fire,” he said with regret. And because of his own laxity in cremation, his crude first fruits stalk abroad to accuse him.

At this early period, Melville had nothing very significant to say; but he seems to have been urged to say it with remorseless pertinacity. In Pierre, he satirises his youthful and reckless prolixity where he speaks of his manuscripts as being of such flying multitudes that “they were to be found lying all round the house; gave a great deal of trouble to the housemaids in sweeping; went for kindlings to the fires; and forever flitting out of the windows, and under the doorsills, into the faces of people passing the manorial mansion.”

Having nothing very particular to write about, he followed an ancient tradition, and wrote of love. In Pierre, which is Melville’s spiritual autobiography, and in Pierre alone, does Melville elaborately busy himself with romantic affection. And in Pierre, his is no sugared and conventional preoccupation. He traces his own development through the love-friendship of boyhood, the miscellaneous susceptibility of adolescence, to a crucifixion in manhood between the images of his wife and his mother. His first Fragment from a Writing Desk seems to have been conceived at a time before his “innumerable wandering glances settled upon some one specific object.”

His second Fragment from a Writing Desk concerns itself with an allegorical quest of elusive feminine loveliness: a kind of Coelebs in Search of a Wife, allegorised and crossed with Lalla Rookh. It survives, as has been said, only as a fragment of a Fragment. Its conclusion must remain a mystery until some old newspaper file disgorges its secrets. It begins as follows:

This airy jaunt terminated, of course, in an Arabian Nights exterior, which Melville particularises after the “voluptuous” traditions of Vathek and Lalla Rookh. “The grandeur of the room,” of course, “served only to show to advantage the matchless beauty of its inmate.” This matchless beauty was, after established tradition, “reclining on an ottoman; in one hand holding a lute.” Her fingers, too, “were decorated with a variety of rings, which as she waved her hand to me as I entered, darted forth a thousand coruscations, and gleamed their brilliant splendours to the sight.”

“As I entered the apartment, her eyes were downcast, and the expression of her face was mournfully interesting; she had apparently been lost in some melancholy revery. Upon my entrance, however, her countenance brightened, as with a queenly wave of the hand, she motioned my conductress from the room, and left me standing, mute, admiring and bewildered in her presence.”

“For a moment my brain spun round, and I had not at command a single of my faculties. Recovering my self-possession, however, and with that, my good-breeding, I advanced en cavalier and, gracefully sinking on one knee, I bowed my head and exclaimed ‘Here do I prostrate myself, thou sweet Divinity, and kneel at the shrine of thy—’”

But here, just at the climax of the quest, the clipping is abruptly torn, and the reader is left cruelly suspended.

From the publication of Lalla Rookh, in 1817, to the publication of Thackeray’s Our Street in 1847, there settled upon letters and life in England an epidemic of hankering for the exotic. At the instigation of Lalla Rookh, England made a prim effort to be “purely and intensely Asiatic,” and this while delicately avoiding “the childishness, cruelty, and profligacy of Asia.” In the fashionable literature of the period, the harem and the slave-market unburdened its gazelles and its interior decorations, and by a resort to divans and coruscating rubies, and ottar of roses, and lutes, and warm panting maidens, the “principled goodness” of Anglo-Saxon self-righteousness was thrilled to a discreet voluptuousness.

In his second Fragment, Melville has caught at some of the drift-wood of this great tidal wave that was washed across the Atlantic. And in acknowledgment of this early indebtedness, he in Pierre speaks of Tom Moore with an especial burst of enthusiasm, mating him with Hafiz, Anacreon, Catullus and Ovid.

Reared in a New England environment that had been soberly tempered by Mrs. Chapone and Mrs. Barbauld, Melville had, under the goadings of poverty, the frustrations of his environment, and the teasing lure of some stupendous discovery awaiting him at the rainbow’s end, plunged into the hideousness of life in the forecastle of a merchantman. At both extremes of his journey he reaped only disillusion. As a practically penniless sailor in Liverpool he enjoyed the freedom of the streets: and the architecture of the city impressed him less than did the sights of the poverty and viciousness to which he was especially exposed. Back he came to Lansingburg, to the old pump in the yard, the stiff-corseted decorum, and the threadbare and pretentious proprieties of his mother, to decline into the enforced drudgery of teaching school. The sights of Liverpool and the forecastle had given no permanent added beauty to home. He did not comfortably fit into any recognised socket of New England respectability. He sought escape in books, in amateur authorship. And Burton, and Anacreon, and Tom Moore are not guaranteed to reconcile a boy in ferment to a tame and repugnant environment. He was like a strong wine that clears with explosive violence. He had been to sea once, and there acquired some skill as a sailor. The excitement and hardship and downrightness of ocean life, when viewed through the drab of the ensuing years, treacherously suffered a sea-change. After three and a half years of mounting desperation, he was ripe for a transit clean beyond the pale of civilisation.

“I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote,” he later wrote in an effort to explain his second hegira; “I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.” The trip to Liverpool had slammed the sash on one magic casement; but the greater part of the watery world was still to be viewed. “Why,” he asks himself perplexed at his own mystery, “is almost every healthy boy with a robust healthy soul, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother to Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to all.” The key he here offers to the heart of his mystery is itself locked in mystery; though when he compared himself to Narcissus tormented by the irony of being two, Melville may have been hotter on the trail of the truth than he was aware. His deepest insight, perhaps, came to him one midnight, out on the Pacific, where in the glare and the wild Hindoo odour of the tryworks of a whaler in full operation, he fell asleep at the helm. “Starting from a brief standing sleep,” he says, “I was horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. I thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by. Nothing seemed before me but a jet of gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern.”

In a headlong retreat from all havens astern, on January 3, 1841, Melville shipped on board the Acushnet, a whaler bound for the South Seas.