John Adams High School - Clipper Yearbook (Ozone Park, NY)

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I Call Me Ishmael By George Bogin -- l ERMAN MELVILLE sprang from the awakening seed of nineteenth century American lit- erature. He came suddenly to the stale public eye, like a comet, and like a comet he spun quickly away. Years after this phenomenon had left the skies, someone discovered that some of the sparks left scattered behind had shed a new and strange light. The sparks were resurrected, reunited and the meteor, Herman Melville, was brought back to the wide-eyed gaze of a new public. Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1st, 1819. He was descended from paternal Scotch stock and maternal Dutch. Until his fatherys death in 1852, the family was fairly well- to-do, but Alan Melville died, leaving little money and eight chil- dren. Herman was a weak child and his cheeks grew paler with the snows of new winters. He was melancholy and moody as a mere infant. Wluen he was six, his father sent this note along with Her- man on the boy's visit to his Uncle Thomas in Albany. Herman is backward in speech and somewhat slow in comprehension, but you will find him as far as he understands men and things, both solid and profound and of a docile and amiable disposition. The crowded houses that the Melville's lived in at various times were only thin coverings for Herman's imagination. His sombre eyes followed the trim little packets across the sea, and he had revisited the ports of the world dozens of times. Alan Melville, himself, had been a great traveller. He had noted down that in twenty years he had travelled 24,425 miles by land, 48,840 miles by water and had been 643 days at sea. Recollections of the stories his father once told of his many travels, of his two year stay in Paris, the books and prints from foreign lands that he brought home, make an older Herman yearn to be suddenly away from the four-walled convention- Twenty-eight

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l-lurk I fear the loveliness That darkness brings, I fear the night that steals On sabled Wings. I fear the crescent moon Suspended by an unseen thread, I fear the purple lilac And the hawthorne-dead. I fear the silvered pools And the gentle rains- I cannot help but fear- Wlnen loveliness so pains. Dome Kind!

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alism of New York City. Lewis Mumford says in his biography of Melville, New York taught Herman Melville to be discontented with New Yorkfl When Herman was fifteen, he got a job as a clerk in the New York State Bank and later in the same year he went over to his brother Gansevoort's hat shop to fill the same position. His wild young dreams of adventure and romance were suffocated by the cold stagnancy of the shop. He filled a miserable two years there, and in 1836 when he was seventeen, he went upstate to visit his uncle Thomas at Broadhall. He helped in the hay fields and when autumn came he taught school. His mother had, in the interim, moved to Lansingburgh near Albany, and Herman stayed there for a while. Finding no answer to his quest for life at Lansingburgh, he decided to board a ship for Europe and work his way to the places he had seen only in reverie. He had barely enough money for the trip down the river from Albany, and all the bitterness a young boy is capable of enveloped him as he stood in the cold darkness on the deck of the river boat, the rain beating against his face and finding his neck beneath the upturned collar, while inside the easy-going passengers joked over wine and crackers in the warm and lighted room. Later Melville cries in Recz'bzzwz, echoes from his youth. Talk not of the bitterness of middle-age and after life. A boy can feel all that, and much more, when upon his young soul the mild dew has fallen, and the fruit, which with others is only blasted after ripeness, with him is nipped in the first blossom and bud. And never again can such blights be made good, they strike in too deep, and leave such a scar that the air of Paradise might not erase it. Herman Melville sailed from the port of New York, a common seaman on the merchant ship Highlander,'l plying a route between New York and Livervpool. The Highlander, was Herman's Har- vard, but the courses were not as gentle. He majored in disillusion- ment under the tutelage of the mean and low-characted captain Riga and mate jackson. Melville writes of this voyage in Redbzzrn, a book which he personally considered a pot boiler, but where he pours out in certain parts of the narrative, all the stifled anguish of a youth's appraisal of the world and men. His first bitter disappoint- ment of this period was the crew of the Highlander, Villainous, illiterate, and vulgar, they listened to Herman's moralizing and good language contemptuously. Underneath he discovered a softer clay, but the world had hardened them. Then came his glimpse of Eng- land, Liverpool. Wfas England Liverpool? For Liverpool meant cry- ing babies, bawling women, drunken sailors, miserable slums, smoke- dyed houses, and crumbling docks. London was a little better for its vastness could not intensify the misery as had Liverpool. When Herman returned to America he was to receive another shock, but 'YN P11 fy at A 'TZ , , Q 4 EN ,- 2 2, 5 ... i phage: -- QZ X 5 Q-f i Twenty-nine xx N ,W 9 , Z' X X f N Xl X, F S S- if X 7