October 2021 - Typee and Toilet Paper: Visiting Melville’s Lansingburgh House

Some years ago—never mind how long—I decided it was high time to go visit the Melville family residence in Lansingburgh, New York.  Not as well known as Arrowhead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the well-funded and much-visited official residence where Melville composed Moby-Dick and other classic narratives, the house in Lansingburgh was not open to the public unless one got in touch with a member of the Lansingburgh Historical Society, which maintained the premises.  As the Melville family residence from 1838 until 1847, from which Herman was absent during his almost four years at sea (January 1841 through October 1844), the Lansingburgh house and its surrounding community seemed worth visiting as a means to better comprehend the author, particularly since this was the abode in which he wrote much of Typee and Omoo on his return from the South Seas. 

Motoring up to the Hudson Valley where two of my siblings lived and staying with my brother just north of the old whaling town of Hudson, New York, my consort and I planned a day’s excursion up to the Melville house.  The town of Lansingburgh no longer existed but was part of the city of Troy and about an hour’s drive north from where we were staying.  Having secured entry to the house from the ever-helpful Melville researcher and local historian Warren Broderick, we arrived there on a blisteringly hot August day after driving north on Route 4 past many blocks of shabby urban row houses, pizzerias and tattoo parlors, and abandoned industrial sites.  Situated just a block from the Hudson River at 114th street and 1st Avenue, and with a pleasant park next to it, the Melville home in Lansingburgh is a slightly faded Victorian-looking clapboard house that Melville’s mother Maria rented after seeking cheaper lodgings for the family outside Albany following the failure of the family fur business run by Herman’s older brother Gansevoort as a result of the Panic of 1837.  As I soon learned from our guide, in the early nineteenth century Lansingburgh was a prosperous ship-building center, and when the Erie Canal opened in 1825, it benefited from the dramatic commercial growth of the region.  From the Melville house one could admire the views of the Hudson River, Van Schaick Island on the opposite bank, the Mohawk River debouching around it on its western side, and the eastern terminus of the Erie Canal only a short distance upriver.  Since the Melvilles inhabited it, the main entrance to the house had been moved from the west side facing the river (and what is now called Herman Melville Park), to the north, where it now gave onto a comfortable-looking porch.  Situated at the northwest corner of the house on the second floor was a room with a bay window.  As we were told, this was the very room in which Herman wrote Typee (and later Omoo) and became an overnight literary celebrity in 1846.

Meeting the local individual who would let us in, we entered the spacious double parlor of the house, which was filled with older furniture but unfortunately nothing from the era of the Melville occupancy of the premises.  Lacking the funds to thoroughly rehabilitate the building, the Lansingburgh Historical Society was doing its best to maintain the integrity of the house despite the chronic leaks and dry rot that invariably affect venerable historic structures like this.  Making desultory talk with our guide, I sought to immerse myself in the ambience of the old house, imagining the Melville family gathered here—the widowed mother Maria diligently trying to keep her eight children’s lives on track; Herman’s older brother Gansevoort, an invalid during the late 1830s (probably as a result of his exposure to mercury poisoning during his management of the family fur business in Albany); younger brother Allan coming and going as an apprentice lawyer in his Uncle Peter’s law firm in Albany; youngest brother Tom, attempting to get as much education as he could before later going to sea in his brother Herman’s wake; and Melville’s four sisters—Helen, Augusta, Catherine, and Frances—trying to help their mother as much as they could to keep the family fed, clothed, and educated.  Gansevoort would have been lying on the couch reading and making a careful tally of the various subjects he read about in his Index Rerum, some of which he shared with Herman and Allan for their edification.  The double parlor with its view of the Hudson had its charms, but was there more to see?  Inquiring of my guide about the rest of the house, I was told that the upstairs rooms were rented to a tenant to defray the cost of maintaining the building.  Would that I could see the room in which Melville wrote much of Typee, which he began in New York City in early 1845 but finished at home that summer. Now considered Melville’s first “novel,” Typee was his immensely entertaining and compelling narrative of his alter ego Tommo’s desertion from a whaling vessel in the Marquesas Islands and subsequent four-month residence with a tribe of cannibals—whose allegedly primitive society turned out in many ways to be more humane and well-ordered than life in the economically turbulent nineteenth-century United States and England.

 As my consort and I were getting ready to exit the house so the guide could lock up again, there suddenly emerged from nowhere a bare-chested strapping young man in harem pants, with piercings through his nipples, a variety of tattoos, unshaven cheeks, and a disheveled coiffure.  Rushing ahead of us out the door into the hot August sun, he sprinted across the yard in front of the house as we paused in wonderment at this mysterious inhabitant of the house, apparently the upstairs tenant.  As we watched in fascination while leaving the house, the man ran up to a young woman who had just gotten out of her old Volkswagon with her arms full of toilet paper, which the man quickly took from her and then sprinted back into the house, as she returned to her car.  Was this really the individual who now occupied the room in which Melville wrote his immortal Typee?  Could it be possible? 

As we thanked the guide for giving us access to the house, my consort and I wondered aloud about the domestic drama that had just played out before our eyes.  To be sure, the tenant of the room in which Melville wrote Typee looked like a modern-day primitive, with the requisite partial nudity, tattoos, piercings, and untamed hair.  But what was the role—or should I say roll—of toilet paper in his drama?  Was he so hard up that he couldn’t afford his own bathroom tissue?  Did he rely on a woman friend to tend to his intimate personal needs?  Was he facing an emergency that caused him to call his girlfriend on the phone to rescue him from the horror of an unhygienic bowel movement?  And who was this young man?  Was he a starving artist, a recluse, or an impecunious grad student from nearby Rensselaer Polytechnic?  Did he know anything about the glorious literary heritage of the rooms he occupied? 

There being no answers to these proliferating questions, it seemed best to walk away from the house and go explore the neighborhood, first of all the nearby Lansingburgh Academy which Melville attended in 1838 in order to learn surveying in order to get a job on the Erie Canal, and where he acted the part of Shylock in a performance of scenes from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice that December.  (The building now functions as a branch of the Troy Public Library.)  These confirmed facts seemed more promising to ponder.  In the end, to visit the Melville house in Lansingburgh includes witnessing the evidence of post-industrial decline in twenty-first-century America, but it is also gives you the opportunity to explore the highly evocative world of a great American writer whose ghost still haunts the houses in which he lived.