Lavender's clothes, manners, and the conspicuous absence of any reference to the sex of his lovers, strongly suggests that Melville created here one of the first American portraits of an effeminate, Black male sodomite. (This is also the earliest known portrait of the sodomite as hairdresser.)

JACK BLUNT
Another sailor on the Highlander, Jack Blunt, has a Dream Book with red covers, which tells how to foretell the future. Without indirection, Redburn reports: this Blunt "had a sad story about a man-of-war's-man who broke his heart at Portsmouth during the late war, and threw away his life recklessly." That blunt statement is probably the first in American fiction in which male comes out so directly as lover of male.

Another "incomprehensible" story of Blunt's is about some "sort of fairy sea-queen;" In the late nineteenth century, says Partridge, "queen" or "quean" was used to refer to "A homosexual, esp. one with girlish manners and carriage."

Melville's use of "queen" suggests the word had some such meaning by mid-century. "Fairy" is first known to refer to homosexuals in 1896. But Melville's use of "fairy" in 1849 hints that that word also referred to an effeminate male by mid-century.

LARRY
Yet another sailor, Larry, a "whaleman," was "a somewhat singular man . . , with his eyes cast down." Downcast eyes would, a hundred years later, be called a sure sign of homosexuality; a friend recalls reading in 1955, in a popular magazine of such a symptom.

Larry's travels as a sailor had familiarized him with the "life of nature," and he is said to cast "some illiberal insinuations against civilization" -- and Christianity. In "Madagasky," he says, "You don't see any Methodist chaps feeling dreadful about their souls." What's the use of being "snivelized" Larry asks Redburn; "Blast Ameriky, I say. Attacks against "civilization" were associated with several early sodomitical defenses.12

MAX
A sailor named "Max the Dutchman" is called by Redburn "the best-natured man among the crew." Max, "an old bachelor . . , very precise about his wardrobe," treats Redburn "better than the rest." This sailor's "hair, whiskers, and cheeks were of a fiery red; and as he wore a red shirt," he was "the most combustible looking man." Redburn recalls: "Max sometimes manifested some little interest in my welfare."

Later it turns out Max is not a "bachelor," as first stated, but has two wives, usefully domiciled three thousand miles apart, in Liverpool and New York. When Redburn ventures that bigamy is "every way immoral," the furious Max tells him not to meddle in others' lives. Did not the Biblical King Sol have "a whole frigate-full of wives," asks Max, his nautical metaphor alluding to shipboard "marriages" of males. The angry Max warns Redburn: "mind your eye, Buttons, or I'll crack your pepper-box for you!" -- a covert threat of sexual assault.13

DONALD
Even the wooden figurehead on the Highlander displays an equivocal sexuality. The ship sports a male figurehead -- a kilted Scotsman called "Donald," with "blue bonnet and the most vermillion of cheeks" -- an appearance suggest-­ing a definite ambiguity of masculinity.

It should be apparent by now that Redburn's mates constitute a nautical rogues gallery. The sailor who refers to Redburn's "sweetmeats," the one who calls him "Buttons, " the kindly Greenlander with the ear-rings, the evil-eyed Jackson, the captain, Max the Dutchman, the steward Lavender, and even the figurehead Donald, are all described to hint at some ambiguity of gender; almost every sailor characterized in any detail displays some tendency to erotic or gender deviance.

LIVERPOOL
The young Redburn finally arrives in the "great commercial city" of Liverpool. Narrator Redburn uses this occasion to warn readers of the "perils" the visitor runs there "from the denizens of notorious Corinthian haunts in the vicinity of the docks, which in depravity are not to be matched by anything this side of the pit that is bottomless."14

On those depraved Liverpool docks, we are told, "all nations of Christendom, and even those of Heathendom, are represented." Each ship docking there is "an island, a floating colony of the tribe to which it belongs."

YARD-ARMS
In those docks, "under the beneficent sway of the Genius of Commerce, all climes and countries embrace; and yard-arm touches yard-arm in brotherly love." Those embraces under the sway of commerce signify an intimate intercourse of economic and genital politics.

"Yard" was an American colonial word for penis. A "yard-arm" is the long, slender spar projecting at a right-angle from a sailing ship's mast. The yard-arm that touched yard-arm in brotherly love is thus another of Melville's punning references to male-male erections and connections. That Melville endowed "yard-arm" with such a double meaning is supported by events that follow.

HERMAPHRODITE
Every day a new ship docks beside the Highlander: a Glasgow brig, manned by "sober" Scotsmen is "replaced by a jovial French hermaphrodite," its decks "echoing with song" and "much dancing." A "hermaphrodite" was a sailing vessel combining the characteristics of two kinds of ships. But that Melville intended another double entendre is clear. "Hermaphrodite" was an old term for an "effeminate man or virile woman," as well as for a "catamite" (partner of a pederast).15 Melville's well-named "hermaphrodite" was "jovial" with song and dance, as male no doubt partnered male in gay abandon.

FRIENDLY BACHELOR
In Liverpool, Redburn recalls, he went on board a "salt-drogher," one of the small boats with "red sails" which carry cargo to ocean-going ships. This salt-drogher was manned by "a bachelor, who kept house all alone," and "had an eye to having things cozy around him. It was in the evening; and he invited me down into his sanctum to supper; and there we sat together like a couple in a box at an oyster-celler."[11]

Privately coupled, like a man and woman on a date, the skipper tells Redburn that "' Just before going to bed" he has a nightcap and smoke: "'but stop, let's to supper first.'" Redburn consumes a meal and a good quantity of beer with this "old ruby of a fellow,"
with a "rubicund" nose. Then, feeling guilty about such oral satisfaction, Redburn moves to leave: "my conscience smote me for thus indulging in the pleasures of the table."

"Now, don't go, said he; don't go, my boy; don't go out into the damp; take an old Christian's advice," laying his hand on my shoulder; . . . if you stay here, you'll soon be dropping off to a nice little nap."

"But notwithstanding these inducements, I shook my host's hand and
departed."

Still secure in his virtue and innocence young Redburn survives his first proposition from a male.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF LIVERPOOL
In the Liverpool sections of Redburn Melville introduced a devastating social critique. Redburn finds his father's guidebook is not only outdated, it lies: its prettified pictures are contradicted by horrifying poverty. He learns that this city's "principle commerce" had once been "the African slave-­trade"; its present private enterprise is associated with sights of starving beggars, dying women and children.

Melville had earlier introduced a satirical critique of commercialism. On his way to Liverpool, Redburn had tried to read Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, but "fell asleep" and "never slept so sound before." He found Smith's book most useful as a "pillow," though after laying his sleeping head upon it, Redburn "sometimes waked feeling dull and stupid."

Redburn's old copy of Wealth of Nations is inscribed: "Jonathan Jones, from his particular friend Daniel Dods, 1798." The hint is that this economic classic was once the gift of Dods to his male lover. If this seems far-fetched, "particular friend," by 1828, referred to "a favorite mistress," as well as close friend. Melville hints throughout Redburn at a close conjunction between the personal politics of intimacy and the economic politics of a commercial system. (This is clearest in the Harry Bolton sections discussed later.)

ADORABLE CHARMERS
While in Liverpool, taking a "ramble into the country," Redburn "Makes The Acquaintance Of Three Adorable Charmers" -- as the chapter title coyly insists. At a country cottage, he discovers three young women, one of whom inspires in him, he claims, an "ardent admiration": she is "the most beautiful rosebud" he has seen in England. Sharing with these charmers a meal of tea and buttered muffins, he watched them consume their muffins and "wished I was a buttered muffin" (the wish to be eaten expresses a passivity not commonly associated with the Victorian male). He briefly fantasized, he says, taking home one of the charmers as "a beautiful English wife," but admits he went off and has "never seen them since: . . . but to this day I live a bachelor on account of these ravishing charmers."

With this insufferable romantic nonsense, Melville formally established Redburn's "ardent" interest in damsels (and his "bachelor" status) and, in the very next chapter, introduced the "handsome," equivocal Harry Bolton.

Melville's strategy was clearly to balance a "dubious" male-male intimacy against a male-female love interest -- a ploy anticipating that of Whitman who, in 1860, balanced his "Calamus" poems of male-male love against his "Children of Adam" poems of male-female attraction. But Melville's coy description of the "charmers" is so clearly sentimental, inflated, and false, his arrangement of chapters so transparently calculated, they seem as much designed to be seen through as to disguise. Like Whitman, Melville displays a simultaneous impulse to confess and to hide his interest in male-­male intimacy.

Melville balances Redburn's later intimacy with Harry Bolton against Redburn's alleged attraction to a woman, suggesting not any authentic bisexuality of character, but an intent to deceive middle-class readers. These were assumed to perceive an illicit male-male eroticism and a proper male-­female attraction as mutually exclusive; Redburn's interest in a woman was intended to free his attraction to Harry Bolton from sodomitical taint.

But many of the sailors described in Redburn convincingly display erotic interest in both men and women. This points to an important difference in the eroticism and perceptions of working-class and middle-class men in the mid-nineteenth-century.

The middle class apparently assumed male-male and male-female eroticism to be absolutely opposed and canceling. That assumption lay behind Whitman's claim to the upper-class John Addington Symonds that he had fathered six children -- the implication being that he could not, therefore, be a celebrant of physical intimacy between men. In contrast, Melville's working-class sailors seem to accept the simultaneous existence of male-male and male-female attraction.

Melville's felt need to balance Redburn's intimacy with Bolton against Redburn's attraction to a woman also means that by mid-century, even for the middle class, close friendship between men was becoming suspect --­ requiring that it be distinguished from the sodomitical. Just a year after the U.S. publication of Redburn, Tennyson's "In Memorium caused an uneasy stir due to the intensity of male-male love it evoked, even though the dear departed was conveniently dead and buried, preventing any physical intercourse of bodies.[11]  But it was not until the 1880s that American doctors would lead the onslaught on the old romantic friendships between men and between women, pointing out their illicit and previously unperceived eroticism.

(In Part II, meets Harry Bolton, and Carlo and his organ.)

======================================================

Notes to Part I

[1A] Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (1927), p. 177 via Project Guttenberg on November 20, 2024, https://jenseyatvajameh.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/studies-in-the-psychology-of-sex-volume-2-by-havelock-ellis.pdf

1  A number of the erotic allusions in Redburn were discussed by Edwin Havand Miller in his biography Melville (New York: Braziller, 1975), initiat­ing my interest in the novel. But Miller's thinking is finally so strait-­jacketed by smug references to "arrested" sexual development and other thought-stopping Freudian orthodoxies he fails to fully explore and ad-­equatedly interpret Melville's sustained allusions in Redburn to raunch.

2  Sexual Inversion, quoted in Jonathan Katz, ed., Gay American History (here­after GAH; New York: Crowell, 1976), 52.

3  Dictionary of Slang, 6th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 854.

4  Buttons" may have meant "tits" and/or suggested some other specifically erotic reference. The French "bout on" meant "teat" and the female sexual organ; Rabelais used "bouton de rose" to mean "the head of' the penis"; and "bout on damour" referred to the clitoris; see John Stephen Farmer, Vocabula Amatoria (London: 1896), 45-46. By 1912 Gertrude Stein had composed a prose poem "Tender Buttons," whose title Virgil Thomson has suggested, had erotic connotations; see Thopson's "A Very Difficult Author," New York Review of Books, Apr. 8, 1971, 4. In 1936 the Black singer Lil Johnson recorded "Press My Button, Ring My Bell," in which "button" referred to the clitoris; cited in Peter Tamony^'s unpublished paper "Dike: A lesbian" (1972), 5.

5  Albert Barrere and Charles G. I.eland, eds., A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant . . . (London: Ballantyne Press, 1889-90), v. 1, 172.

6  Of the thirteen Syrian kings named Antiochus I have not identified forcer-­tain the particular one to whom Melville may refer, or the particular disease of which Melville hints, though his suggestion is venereal. The Encylopedia Britannica, eleventh edition, says that Antiochus IV (176-164 C.) was orig­inally made king by Caligula, was "half-brilliant" and "half-crazy," had an enthusiasm for Hellenic culture -- or, at any rate, for its externals," and "scandalized the world by his riotous living and undignified familiarities." He died "after exhibiting some sort of mental derangement ¹¹; (Cambridge, Eng.: University of Cambridge, 1910-11), v. 2, 132; v. 24, 605. In English literary tradition the name Antiochus is associated with father-daughter incest; see
Shakespeare ("Pericles," Act II, Scene 4.) I thank Walter Kendrick for help with this research.

7  Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 80 n. 91. Also see Vern L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History (New York: Wiley, 1976), 135, 139, 141.

8  Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter OED), v. 4, part 2, 86-87; Supplement to the OED (1972), v. 1, 1206.

9  Dictionary of Slang, 676. "Queen" is also later applied to Harry Bolton; see Part II.

10  Katz, GAH, 44; the OED date for the same document, 1895, is incorrect. Partridge's Dictionary of Slang also incorrectly states that "fairy" was not used to mean homosexual until about 1924.

11  My informant is my friend David Roggensack.

12  See, for example, Charles Warren Stoddard's letters to Whitman, and Stoddard's "A South Sea Idyl" in~, 501-08. The works of Edward Carpenter also include not only Homogenic Love (1894) but Civilization, Its Cause and Cure (1889).

13  Re "crack your pepper-box, Shakespeare used "crack" to mean a "rupture of [a woman's] chastity"; he also used "box unseen" to refer to the female sexual organ; see Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy (New York: Dutton, 1960), 78, 96. The meaning of "box" was thus readily extended to the anus. "Pepper" (hot) and "box" (anus) suggest the modern American phrase "to have a hot ass" (to be erotically aroused). The threat of anal penetration suggested by "crack your pepper-box" is also suggested in another scene in Redburn in which the crew, taking advantage of a slight, silent passenger (a stutterer), punishes him for climbing up the rigging -- by tying him to the ropes according to an "old custom" called "making a spread eagle of the man -- a symbolic rape.

14 Corinth, the ancient Greek maritime and commercial city was famous for its whore houses, erotic festivals and temple rituals; see Hans Licht, Sexual Life in Ancient Greece (London: Abbey Library, 1932), 87, 129, 340-41, 388 ff, 457-58.

15  OED, v. 5, part 1, 243; in Ten Years Before the Mast (1840) Richard Henry Dana referred to a "hermaphrodite brig."

16  Partridge, Dictionary of Slang, The French "Des Amitie's particuliares" was early used to refer to potentially erotic male-male intimacy; see 289. "Jonthan Jones" was possibly based on a Rev. Bradford, minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, Albany, N. Y., which Herman Melville's family attended prior to 1818; see William Gilman, Melville's Early Life and Redburn (New York: New York University Press, 1951).

17  Whitman, quoted in Katz, GAH, 349-50.

======================================================

Part II: Melville's Secret Sex Text

HARRY BOLTON

In chapter forty-four of Redburn Melville introduces the equivocal Harry Bolton "To The Favorable Consideration Of The Reader."[1] Melville primes us to take Bolton favorably!

Young Bolton is said to be "one of those small, but perfectly formed beings, with curling hair, and silken muscles, who seem to have been born in cocoons."

Harry, in other words, is a butterfly. That delicate creature has, I suspect, among sailors especially, long signified a propensity to male-male eroticism. In 1964, on the London subway, I met a sailor who showed me a butterfly tattoo on his arm, by way I now realize, of identifying his proclivities and a come-on. Butterfly was also an American homosexual novel published in 1934.[2]

Harry Bolton's complexion is described as "brunette, feminine as a girl's; his feet were small; his hands were white; and his eyes were large, black and womanly; and, poetry aside, his voice was as the sound of a harp."

But where, narrator Redburn coyly asks his readers, among the depraved docks of Liverpool, did he meet this "courtly youth?" He answers: "Several evenings I had noticed him in our street of boarding houses, standing in the doorways." What Bolton was doing in those' dusky doorways is not discussed, but Bolton's prostitution is hinted at later.

Redburn adds: Bolton's "beauty, dress, and manner struck me as so out of place in such a street, that I could not possibly divine what had transplanted this delicate exotic" from an aristocratic neighborhood in London to a Liverpool slum. But Redburn "smoothed down the skirts of my jacket, and at once accosted him." Those "skirts" and that "accosting" suggest a dual sexual role.

Bolton tells Redburn he was an orphan who had lost his small fortune gambling. He had resolved to carve out a fresh fortune" in America, crossing the ocean as a sailor -- an attempt, also, to prove himself "manly." Bolton's new "scorn of fine coats," says Redburn, corresponded with his "reckless contempt . . . for all past conventionalities."

"UNSEAMAN LIKE"
Redburn doubted Bolton's wisdom in traveling as a sailor, for Bolton's "unseaman like person" seemed "more suited to the Queen's drawing-room than a ship's forecastle." My suspicion suggests that "unseaman like" is a pun on Bolton's manliness, and that "Queen" has a similar connotation. I earlier noted a sailor's story about a "fairy sea-queen," and there are later references to queens and fairies.

GUINEA-PIG
Bolton claimed to have worked as a sailor in the East India service -- in which office he was known as a "guinea-pig." Redburn explains that "guinea-pig" was "a humorous appellation" then bestowed on student naval officers. He adds of Bolton: "considering the perversity of his behavior, his delicate form, and soft complexion, and that gold guineas had been his bane, this appellation was not altogether . . . inapplicable."

But "guinea-pig" also referred to any professional whose fee for service was a guinea. Shakespeare used used "guinea-hen" to refer to a courtesan.[3] Melville's hint again associates Bolton's attractive effeminacy with money.

Bolton hinted to Redburn of his romances with two women -- including "enigmatical allusions to a certain Lady Georgiana Theresa." Redburn himself eventually came to doubt the truth of Bolton's stories, so the modern reader may be excused for speculating that enigmatic "Lady Georgiana" was really Lord George --  a transsexing later made famous by Proust's Pauline. 

LORD LOVELY
That Bolton had earlier been a high-class male whore is suggested delicately by his accounts to Redburn of "his first introduction . . . to the Madcap Marquis of Waterford," and his reference to "My old chum, Lord Lovely."

In a walk around  Liverpool, Bolton and Redburn suddenly discover the aforementioned Lord Lovely who, for unspecified reasons, Bolton is horrified to see. Redburn calls the lovely Lovely not much of a Lord to behold; very thin and limber about the legs, with small feet like a doll's, and a small, glossy head like a seal's. I had seen just such looking lords standing in sentimental attitudes in front of Palmo's in Broadway.

The reference is to Palmo's Opera House in New York City, in front of which, apparently, in Melville's day, there lounged numbers of doll-like, aristocracy-aspiring males of doubtful character.

THE MARQUIS
Another of Bolton's stories, about the Marquis of Bristol offering him a home, begins to breed, even in innocent young Redburn, "some suspicions concerning the rigid morality of my friend, as a teller of truth." Redburn "cherished toward Harry a heart, loving and true." But "suspicions" about Bolton's morals made Redburn "hold back my whole soul from him; when, in its loneliness, it was yearning to throw itself into the unbounded bosom of some immaculate friend."

Poignant regret at this opportunity for intimacy lost due to puritanical strictures summarizes Redburn's relationship with Bolton.

A "MYSTERIOUS NIGHT"
In order, as Bolton claimed, to recover a "considerable sum" of money, Bolton travels to London, taking Redburn along for a "Mysterious Night." This is spent at a "semi-public place of opulent entertainment" in the West End -- Bolton tells the cab driver "No. 40," the "high steps there, with the purple light!" The specificity of address, purple light, and other details suggests Melville may have had some actual place in mind.

This den has ceiling frescos in which "Guido's ever youthful Apollo" appears "in a crimson dawn." At "Morrish-looking tables . . . sat knots of gentlemanly men, with cut glass decanters and taper-waisted glasses." Those effeminate glasses are another example of Melville's endowing inanimate objects with a feminine gender to render ambiguous the masculinity of his human characters. The equivocal masculinity of Donald, the Highlander's male figurehead was noted earlier.

The den's "obsequious waiters" are presided over by "a very handsome florid old man," with whom Bolton disappears for a moment. Redburn then "observed one of the waiters eyeing me a little impertinently, as I thought, and as if he saw something queer about me."

QUUER
he word "queer" is first known to have been applied to American homosexuals in 1920, but Melville¹s use of it here is certainly suggestive.[4] Trying to be nonchalant, Redburn "threw one leg over the other" -- only succeeding in looking queerer -- and felt his "face burning with embarrassment," as if he was "guilty of something."

Redburn saw little parties of gentlemen retiring to the rear of the house and heard one of them "drop the word Rouge; but he could not have used rouge, for his face was exceedingly pale. Another said something about "Loo." The overt reference is to gambling: Webster's indicates that "Rouge" refers to the red compartments in roulette; "Loo" is the name of an old card game, or refers to money staked at that game.

OLD PAINTINGS
Bolton then led Redburn upstairs to a Persian carpeted room hung with lascivious, "mythological oil-paintings".

Melville writes: "There were such pictures as the high-priests, for a bribe, showed to Alexander in the innermost shrine of the white temple in the Libyan oasis: such pictures as the pontiff of the sun strove to hide from Cortez, when, sword in hand, he burst open the sanctorum of the pyramid-fane at Cholula: such pictures as you may still see, perhaps, in the central alcove of the excavated mansion of Pansa, in Pompeii -- in that part of it called by Varro the hollow of the house: such pictures as Martial and Suetonius mention as being found in the private cabinet of the Emperor Tiberius: such pictures as are delineated on the bronze medals, to this day dug up on the ancient island or Capreae: such pictures as you might have beheld in an arched recess, leading from the left hand of the secret side-gallery of the temple of Aphrodite in Corinth."

William Gilman¹s research for his study, Melville's Early Life and Redburn (1951), says that only one of those mythic erotic pictures referred to an actual historical work: Suetonius does mention a picture which Tiberius kept in his bedroom. In a modest back note Gilman says this showed "Atalanta performing a most unnatural service for Meleager." My own research, with historian John Boswell's expert help and translation, indicates that the exact act referred to was a "blow-job" (the original old Latin translates literally as "to gratify with the mouth").

But Melville's other "mythological oil-paintings" are literally just that -- mythological -- a literary joke intended to excite reader's prurient curiosity. The non-existence of those paintings is no failure of scholarship on Melville's part, as Gilman stuffily says, but are Melville's means of inciting pedants like Gilman to explore the history of what in 1951 was still called "unnatural" sex.[5]

ALADIN'S
Upstairs in this fun house Bolton declared: "'We are at home.'" Redburn suffered "dismal forebodings." Did Bolton live here, asked Redburn, "in this Palace of Aladdin"? "Aladdin's Palace" was the name of the place, answered the surprised Bolton. Reference is probably made here to The Arabian Nights, which Melville had read, and which contains episodes involving same-sex eroticism.[6]

Bolton disappears for a time -- and Redburn sleeps uneasily. Bolton returns: Redburn asks if he had been gambling. Bolton answers ambiguously, speaking of suicide. Suddenly angry at all the mystery, Redburn demands: "'tell me your secret, whatever it is.'" In answer, Bolton commands him to swear, "as you love me, Redburn," that he will never question him again "' about this infernal trip to London.

Bolton led Redburn to think he might be collecting an old gambling debt before leaving for America. But Melville^'s ambiguity suggests Bolton may have been picking up some extra cash by returning to his former occupation of male . . . whore. One actual English procurer of male bawds, exposed in the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889, made his way to Seattle, no doubt financing his U.S. emigration on the proceeds of his trade in illicit lust.[7]

CARLO AND HIS ORGAN
If Bolton's background did involve such illicit sexual commerce, he was not the only such emigrant the Highlander carried to America. On the ship, among those traveling to the U.S. says Redburn, was a "rich-cheeked, chestnut-haired Italian boy . . , not above fifteen," whose pensive eye reflected many sad experiences: "It was not an eye like Harry's tho' Harry's was large and womanly. It shone with a soft spiritual radiance." The Italian's head was "heaped with thick clusters of tendril curls," and "reminded you of a classic vase." From "the knee downward, the naked leg was beautiful to behold as any lady's arm; so soft and rounded." This Carlo had no father, and "From the first, Harry took to the boy." Carlo, it seems, had made a living at music -- playing a "hand-organ":

"But do you not sometimes meet with cross and crabbed old men," said Harry, "who would rather have your room than your music?"

"Yes, sometimes," said Carlo, playing with his foot, "sometimes I do."

"And then, knowing the value of quiet to unquiet men, I suppose you never leave them under a shilling?"

"No," continued the boy, I love my organ as I do myself, for it is my only friend, poor organ; it sings to me when I am sad, and cheers me; and I never play before a house, on purpose to be paid for leaving off . . . .

Melville's reference to men wanting Carlo's "room" rather than his music, Melville's casual allusion to the blackmail of sodomites (Carlo's "knowing the [money] value of quiet to unquiet men"), and his pun about Carlo's "organ," are such blatant references to illicit sex it is difficult to understand how, in Victorian America, they were not recognized as scandalous.[8]

FOAMING-AT-THE-MOUTH
How such references escaped notice in the 1840s becomes clearer when we consider that such erotic passages are still not officially recognized in the 1980s. While a Melville industry flourishes in academia, and books are written on such arcane subjects as the possible influence of East Indian mysticism on Whitman, one still risks job and violent critical attack by devoting book or thesis to a close textual analysis of lust. (See, for example, Richard Boyer's foaming-at-the-mouth response to The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry by Robert K. Martin.)[9] Despite the success of Boswell's tome on Christianity, intolerance, and homosex, and his display of scholarly erudition in dozens of footnotes in dozens of languages -- in the American academy of the 1980s, to focus on the details of the erotic, their history and social construction, is still considered risqué and risky.

But Melville's erotic puns, archaism, and allusions reveal much about Victorian (and our) sexuality; they indicate Melville's belief that his respectable readers would not discern his outrageous sexual subtext. He assumed proper Victorians had buried the erotic deep in the unconscious or banished it to distant and indistinct spheres of prostitution, sodomy, or sapphism, making safe the sexual secrets of his story.

Continuing about his organ, Carlo says that when people drive him away from their homes

"I do not think my organ is to blame, but they themselves are to blame; for such people's musical pipes are cracked, and grown rusted, that no more music can be breathed into their souls."

"No, Carlo; no music like yours, perhaps," said Harry with a laugh.

Carlo adds: "'Though my organ is as full of melody, as a hive is of bees; yet no organ can make music in unmusical breasts; no more than my native winds can, when they breathe upon a harp without chords." Given Melville's loaded, coaded sex text, Carlo's winds that breathe on that chordless harp maybe refer to oral copulation performed upon an unresponding penis.

A little later Redburn muses: "music is a holy thing, and its instruments, however humble, are to be loved and revered." Whatever makes music "should be held sacred," adds Redburn:

For even a Jew's harp [a circumcised penis?] may be so played, as to awaken all the fairies that are in us, and make them dance in our souls, as on a moon-lit sward [lawn] of violets. What "subtle power" of such instruments is it "that so enters, without knocking, into our innermost beings, and shows us all hidden things?"

It was not "foolish speculation" for "the glorious Greek of old" (Plato? Socrates?) to "fancy the human soul to be essentially a harmony." If readers granted the theory of Paracelsus and Campanella that "every man has four souls within him" they could explain the "quartets of melody" that may "sing within us" when our music is made by the hoarest old harpers of Wales." Old Wales is known for its harpists; but Melville's "hoarest old harpers of Wales" seems to be a punning reference to the sexual pleasure given us by the whoriest old harpooners of whales.[10]

"Behold the organ!" exclaims narrator Redburn, waxing ecstatic on the instrument. Surely, if much virtue lurks in the "old fiddles" of the Italian city, Cremona, if the value of these fiddles' melody is in proportion to their age, what divine ravishments may we not anticipate from this venerable, embrowned old organ

"Play on, Italian boy!" exhorts Redburn: "and while I list to the organs twain, one yours, one mine -- let me gaze fathoms down into thy fathomless eye. . . . That passage recalls the "yard-arm" that "touches yard-arm in brotherly love" mentioned earlier.

"Play on!" Redburn again commands the world's organs, "for to every note come . . . armies," and "the martial neigh of all the Persian studs." He adds: "But now the pageant passes, and I droop."

But perking up again he declares:

All this could Carlo do -- make, unmake me; build me up; to pieces take me; and join me limb to limb.

"Reverence, then be all street organs," says Redburn, for "Carlo has that to feast the eye as well as ear."

Redburn asks: "if at street corners, for a single penny, I may thus transport myself in dreams Elysian, who so rich as I?"

Redburn's (and Melville's) ode to Carlo's organ ends with a curse on any "slave" who drives from a lord's door this Italian boy's "wondrous box of sights and sounds. Melville's chapter on Carlo ends with a pun. Shakespeare used "box unseen" to refer to the female sexual organ; the meaning of "box" was thus readily extended to the penis and testes, or the anus.[11]

One last reference to Carlo is suggestive. In New York, before the Highlander can dock, the impatient Carlo, promising some watermen "to pay them with his music, was triumphantly rowed ashore . . , his organ before him." Redburn ends: "we never saw Carlo again." But the reader leaves Carlo and his organ sure that both will soon rise to success.

HARRY BOLTON AGAIN
On the ship going back to America, Redburn's mates take an immediate dislike to Harry Bolton, "girlish youth," whose provocative clothes defiantly emphasize his aristocratic, unmanly tastes. One day, says Redburn, Bolton "came on deck in a brocaded dressing-gown, embroidered slippers, and tasseled smoking-cap, to stand his morning watch."

The sailors "took a special spite" at Bolton's wardrobe: "It was curious to listen to the various hints and opinings thrown out" in response to Bolton's "silks, velvets, broadclothes, and satin. I do not know exactly what they thought Harry had been" -- a gambler it is suggested.[12] Bolton "was put down for "a very equivocal character." "Equivocal beings" was the phrase Mary Wollstone craft in 1792 applied to those we would now called homosexuals.[13]

Despite Bolton's "effeminacy of appearance," says Redburn, he had earlier displayed "flashes of spirit." Redburn therefore wondered how Bolton "could now yield himself up to the almost passive reception" of the sailors' contempt. He concluded: "there are passages in the lives of all men" atypical of their more usual ways.

On this trip, says Redburn, "the treatment of the crew threw Harry more and more upon myself for companionship. Bolton "became more communicative concerning his past career," but "he did not make plain many things . . . I was very curious to know."

Bolton had no "regular profession," so sought Redburn's advice about what to do for a living in America. The "two friendless wanderers" held long talks. Redburn suggested that Bolton try for a clerk's job since he claimed to write a fine hand. Bolton's actual hand, Redburn comments, was small, his fingers "long and thin" -- it was "the perfumed hand of Petronius Arbiter, that elegant young buck of a Roman who once cut great Seneca dead in the forum."

PETRONIUS' SATYRICON
Petronius Arbiter's Satyricon, says historian Vern Bullough, "offers the nearest approach to a defense of homosexuality existing in classical Latin literature."[14] Of the Satyricon historian Otto Kiefer says: "the most startling feature" of this satire on Roman sexual life is "the easy and natural way in which Petronius ranks homosexual love beside the love of women, as if it were neither different nor inferior. Encolpius, the narrator of the whole story is himself a homosexual." So is his friend Ascyltus, and their mutual lover, the boy Giton, as well as Trimalchio, "the most popular character in the novel."[15]

Redburn continues: though Bolton's "hand was lady-like looking, and had once been white as the queen's cambric hankerchief," his work as a sailor "subtracted from its original daintiness." Looking at his work-stained hand Bolton asked himself: "Is this the hand I kissed to the divine Georgiana?" Was this the hand which "ratified my bond to Lord Lovely?" That bond to Lovely, ratified by hand, evokes the slang phrase , hand-gig," dating to the 193Os, referring to "A type of male prostitute who will masturbate his clients."[16]

After reaching New York, Redburn was concerned that Bolton, "a stranger in the land," be found a job.[17] Redburn took Bolton to see Goodwell, a clerk -- "just the man to befriend Harry." Goodwill's personal interest in men is hinted at. Goodwell was indeed "impressed by the handsome exterior of my friend." He agreed to help Bolton, entranced, Melville hints, by "handsome" Harry.

Leaving Bolton "looking helpless," Redburn made a rather formal and abrupt apology, returned to his family, a hundred-and-eighty miles away, and "never saw Harry again."

Later, in a letter to Redburn, Goodwell writes that he and Bolton had "walked out together; and my interest in him had increased every day." "Walk out together," in the 1930s, in the UK, meant "to have a clandestine affair."[18] Goodwill added: "But you don't know how dull are the times here . . . [I] could not get Harry a place." Bolton had gone back to sailoring. Once again, an alienating economy had helped to send men spinning away from each other. Redburn relates that Bolton had died in an accident at sea.

CONCLUSION
Considering the economic ruin of Redburn's dead father, the failure of the father's guidebook, the satire on Adam Smith, the picture of beggardom and death by starvation in Liverpool (the second largest English city at the time), and the secret subtext on male-male intimacy, Melville's Redburne emerges as a conscious, critical commentary on the moral bankruptcy of commercial capitalism, the failure of patriarchy, and a hopeful exposition on the positive potential of sex love between males, once freed from puritanic ban.

Redburn's abandonment of Harry Bolton was due to a failure of nerve, the pull of family, and moralistic doubts about Bolton's equivocal person; young Redburn is limited in his response to another man by the strictures of an alienating ethic. That this young Redburn is not exemplary, that the novel Redburn provides only a negative model for moderns, is indicated by Redburn's comment on guidebooks: "In this moving world" not even an up-to-date guidebook can "be a true guide to those who came after you."

Melville's Redburn is a portrait, the very painting of which helps to subvert the ravaging morality it portrays. In writing this "reminiscence," Melville had his narrator, the older Redburn, try to atone for his earlier abandonment of his friend. Melville presented Redburn's recollections as a memorial to the dead Harry Bolton. "But Harry?" Redburn exclaims: "you live over again, as I recall your image before me. I see you, plain and palpable as in life: and can make your existence obvious to others. Is he, then, dead, of whom this may be said?"

Melville's Redburn is, in part, a moving elegy for a dead male loved one.

But in Melville's pen-portrait he not only reclaimed Harry Bolton from oblivion. He also explicitly and poignantly called attention to the "existence" of a "girlish youth" -- one who even "among the droves of mixed . . . beings and centaurs," stood out "like a zebra" in a group of elks. The novel remains a triumphant and touching, sad and loving tribute of man to man.

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Notes to Part II

1. Harry Bolton was probably modeled on Henry Gill, a sailor who returned on Melville's ship from Liverpool in 1839; see William Gilman, Melville's Early Life and Redburn (New York: New York University Press, 1951), 144.
2. Re butterfly, homosexuality is a theme of special interest in the books Butterfly Days (London: Fortune, 1957) and More Butterfly Days (same: 1958 by Aubrey Fowkes (pseud. of Esmond Quinterley); see Ian Young, The Male Homosexual in Literatures: A Bibliography (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1975), 45.
3. John Stephen Farmer [and W. E. Henley], Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present (1903; reprint New York: Arno, 1970), v. 3, 229-30.
4. Jeannette H. Foster, Sex Variant Women in Literature (New York: Vintage, 1956), 266,
5. See Gilman, Melville's Early Life, 355, n.31. For Tiberius's picture see Suetonius, De vita caesarum (The Lives of the Caesars), ch. 3, part 44. An accessible and only partly euphemized translation is by Joseph Gavorse (NY: Modern Library, 1931), p.145-46. John Boswell informs me that the Loeb edition leaves the passage about the picture in the original Latin; John Boswell to J. K., March 12, 1980.
6. The Arabain Nights is discussed by Gilman. "The Palm," a bar frequented by New York "degenerates" in 1899_, is mentioned in Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 289.
7. See Colin Simpson, Lewis Chester, David Leitch, The Cleveland Street Affair (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 221.
8. "Organ" has long been used to refer to a sexual member. The OED lists a reference to the "organs of generation" (1759); v. 7, part 1, 193. The French word "organe" referred to "the penis," the "female pudendum," and the "breach" (ass); see John Stephen Farmer, Vocabula Amatoria (London: 1886), 199. Farmer also lists the French "instrument" and "instrument de musique" as referring to male and female organs; an example is from Rabelais, whom Melville had read.
9. For Boyer's review, see "The Ideology of the Steam-bath," Times Literary Supplement, May 30, 1980, 603-o4. Martin's fine book was published by University of Texas Press in 1979.
10. Re "harpooners," chapter 89 of Moby-Dick includes a sexual pun in which a gentleman is referred to as having "harpooned" a lady; see Robert Shulman, "The Serious Function of Melville's Phallic Jokes," American Literature (1961), 179-81. Farmer's dictionary of French erotic slang translates harpooner as meaning to perform intercourse "without preliminary endearments"; see Vocabula Amatoria, 156.
11. Re box, see Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy (New York: Dutton, 1960), 78. Also see the reference to "crack your pepper-box" earlier in this essay.
12. Jackson, then still in the process of dying, "even asked him [Bolton] to lif't up the lower hem of' his trousers to test the color of' his calves." The reference is interesting but obscure.
13. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York: Norton, 1975), 138.
14. Sexual Variance in Society and History (New York: Wiley, 1976), 145-46.
15. Sexual Life in Ancient Rome (London: Abbey Library, 1934), 248-51.
16. Gershon Legam, "The Language of Homosexuality," in George Henry Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns (New York: Hoeber, 1941), 49-79 (only in this edition.)
17. Curiously, Ward Thomas's homosexual themed novel of 1949 was titled Stranger 1n the Land (Boston: Houghton Mifflin).
18. "Walked out together" suggests courting and a romantic liaison, not just walking. Re walking out together referring to a clandestine affair, see https://www.wordsandphrasesfromthepast.com/dictionary-w---pg-1.html.