He went back into the hotel through the open gate of the service courtyard. In the light of the lanterns the stableboys raised from every side, a stagecoach stood ready to depart. It was the Exeter Mail. He inquired about Woodcut. That carriage would leave the next day, at six in the morning, from a small stable behind Gray’s Inn. He should ask for the Bristol Mail, and take it as far as Cricklade. From there, take the Monmouth Mail as far as. . . . All of their advice was full of high roads, branchings off, and no end of places you left by taking shortcuts.

Back in his lodgings, the logs are burning bright in the fireplace, and he doesn’t light the candle. He undresses in this dancing flame-light, which exaggerates the shadows of his movements. He goes to bed. Now, in the room, there’s nothing but the gentle moaning of the sap simmering at the ends of the logs. He feels strangely free. It’s his own free will that’s in charge, and his mind is full of projects. He sleeps in the nude—an old habit from his sailor years. Under the fresh sheets, he’s splayed open like a starfish. A slow sea-swell lifts and lowers him. “I should never have put that gin in my stout.” But he’s tough, and nothing can rob him of his senses, except for himself—the sea-swell of his own heart. No, for sure, he has no desire to go on writing the kinds of insignificant books he knows how to write. A life’s work is of no interest unless it’s a relentless struggle with the great unknown.

It’s up to me to devise my own compasses and my own rigging. In this game, you always set out either to win it all or to lose everything. On account of the book he’s just written, the one they’re going to publish, he’s going to be taken for a rebel. People like to categorize. He’s a rebel because he’s a poet. But you can really only classify him under his name. He’s no more a writer “of the sea” than others are writers “of the soil.” He’s Melville, Herman Melville. The world whose images he puts into words, it’s the Melvillean world. And anything beyond that, praise be to God!

If there’s a consistency in his work, it can only be his distinctive style. His titles are, in reality, nothing but subtitles. The real title of each and every one of his books is Melville, Melville, Melville, again Melville, always Melville. I express myself; I’m incapable of expressing any being other than myself. I’m not obliged to create what other people want me to create. I don’t get caught up in the law of supply and demand. I create what I am. What I am is a poet.

If he wanted to, he reflected, he could be just as crafty as other people in the publishing trade. But . . . what a meaningless life. They must die of boredom. While he, by contrast, was forever afflicted, forever uneasy, forever out of breath from racing and chasing, always anxious about what was going to rear up around the next bend in the road. Struck down by frightful bouts of hopelessness, by creations that eluded his grasp and crumbled like mud, he would say to himself, “You’re a good-for-nothing, incapable of creating anything of lasting significance.” And, at other times, buoyed with enthusiasm, he’d say to himself, “Well, there you go, there will always be the petty hangers-on.”