Omoo, I have been told, is the Herman Melville title most apt to show up on a crossword puzzle. To call Melville’s second book a novel stretches the meaning of the genre, tho not all that terribly far from places that Jack Kerouac would take it some 115 years hence. There is an “I” & it a has name, “Paul,” & there is a second orienting character – much as Toby was in the earlier Typee – around whom significant portions of the book revolve. This character, Paul’s companion throughout, is known only as The Long Doctor & sometimes as the Long Ghost. This Ghost is as spectral as Neal Cassady’s Dean Moriarty & Cody Pomeray. When “Paul” & the Long Doctor part, the book is one. Indeed, it takes all of three sentences to wrap it up.

If Melville began Typee as a stiff neophyte, by Omoo he has already become the master of pacing in prose, brilliant in his depictions, always with an undercurrent of humor or amusement. D.H. Lawrence gets this when he discovers, or rediscovers, Melville for contemporary readers in his 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature. Lawrence’s romance of the sea sounds preposterous today – science fiction writers have long since stopped writing even of space as such a Final Frontier – but Lawrence’s actual description of Melville the character is spot on – and narrator’s personality is everywhere in evidence in Omoo’s prose:

Omoo is a fascinating book;picaresque, rascally, roving. Melville, as a bit of a beachcomber. The crazy ship Julia sails to Tahiti, and the mutinous crew are put ashore. Put in the Tahitian prison. It is good reading.

Perhaps Melville is at his best, his happiest, in Omoo. For once he is really reckless. For once he takes life as it comes. For once he is the gallant rascally epicurean, eating the world like a snipe, dirt and all baked into one bonne bouche.

For once he is really careless, roving with that scamp, Doctor Long Ghost. For once he is careless of his actions, careless of his morals, careless of his ideals: ironic, as the epicurean must be. The deep irony of your real scamp: your real epicurean of the moment.

Given how autobiographical Melville’s first books are – and the interest & industry that have grown up around his work since Lawrence called our attention back to it again some 82 years ago, it’s curious that no one I’m aware of appears to have tried to fathom out just who Long Ghost might have been.

One could argue, of course, that the account of Omoo captures a set period of time, starting with Melville’s (or Paul’s) departure from the cannibals of Typee & contains his adventures on the ship Julia, led by an incompetent captain & fiendish first mate, and then his stay on Tahiti & the surrounding islands. But one might also argue, with at least as much vindication, that Omoo is the tale of Paul’s relationship with the Long Doctor & that the events of the narrative are incidental to the relationship betwixt these two barely named men.

Barely named. I find it fascinating that Melville, who in just four years will emerge as the most psychological of 19^th century American novelists, offers so little insight here into his characters – certainly into Long Ghost’s – and seems so casually interested in the topic that he can hardly bring himself to name him. Indeed, the fullest description we get of the man is also the first, at the end of the second chapter:

His early history, like that of many other heroes, was enveloped in the profoundest obscurity; though he threw out hints of a patrimonial estate, a nabob uncle, and an unfortunate affair which sent him a-roving. All that was known, however, was this. He had gone out to Sydney as assistant-surgeon of an emigrant ship. On his arrival there, he went back into the country, and after a few months' wanderings, returned to Sydney penniless, and entered as doctor aboard of the Julia.

His personal appearance was remarkable. He was over six feet high--a tower of bones, with a complexion absolutely colourless, fair hair, and a light unscrupulous gray eye, twinkling occasionally at the very devil of mischief. Among the crew, he went by the name of the Long Doctor, or more frequently still, Doctor Long Ghost. And from whatever high estate Doctor Long Ghost might have fallen, he had certainly at some time or other spent money, drunk Burgundy, and associated with gentlemen.

As for his learning, he quoted Virgil, and talked of Hobbs of Malmsbury, beside repeating poetry by the canto, especially Hudibras. He was, moreover, a man who had seen the world. In the easiest way imaginable, he could refer to an amour he had in Palermo, his lion-hunting before breakfast among the Caffres, and the quality of the coffee to be drunk in Muscat; and about these places, and a hundred others, he had more anecdotes than I can tell of. Then such mellow old songs as he sang, in a voice so round and racy, the real juice of sound. How such notes came forth from his lank body was a constant marvel.

Long Ghost, in short, is rather a Rorschach test, a pomo absence-at-the-center a good 120 years before such strategies would become fashionable. As such, Omoo can be read as a character study that hardly notices its character. Reading it feels episodic, not because of the events themselves, but because events as such are a distraction.

A lot gets made of Melville’s perceptions of the impact of the European world on Tahiti, the depredations of the missionaries – who are represented as plainly corrupt, little more than imperialist functionaries – but Melville’s “contemporary” attitudes reach much further than just recognizing how dramatically contact with the West has disrupted island culture. The departures he will make over the next few years, away from such “realism” through the disaster that was The Whale, eventually into poetry, all seem germinating in this tale Lawrence misperceives as being so carefree. It’s the same shipwreck every early modernist would have – recognizing that realism is not real at all, but an overlay of effects. Think of how, some sixty years later, the author of “The Dead” crosses over into Ulysses in the name of a higher realism than the conventional tropes he’d inherited. We see it even now in Thomas Pynchon, perhaps the most narratively obsessed of contemporary writers who, after Gravity’s Rainbow, can only imagine narrativity that operates outside of stories, plots that go nowhere, but go nonetheless. So the echo I hear, finally, from Doctor Long Ghost is not his own, but Sam Beckett’s – “Call that going? Call that on?”