Melville: His World and Work

Melville's output is uneven. There's MOBY DICK and some of the stories in THE PIAZZA TALES, which are widely acknowledged as masterworks. Then, there are the many novels, such TYPEE, OMOO, MARDI, and so forth. These scold me from my shelves, demanding my time and effort, since they are works by a man of genius. But they aren't great books. While certainly not his intention, Delbanco's terrific book, MELVILLE: HIS WORLD AND HIS WORK, has had the effect of liberating me from second-rate Melville. This has happened because Delbanco describes the work in Melville's oeuvre in relation to the masterworks. As a result, this general-interest reader no longer feels the need to plow through Melville's baroque syntax and obscure references, thinking all the works will repay the effort. Instead, I'm now comfortable leaving TYPEE, OMOO, MARDI, and so forth to the specialists. Maybe, I'll retry them one day. But for now, I'm happy knowing how they led to and from the great books. Using this approach, Delbanco explains, for example, how TYPEE is a young man's book of exotic racy adventure in the Marquesan islands; how OMOO follows this best-seller formula, just moving the locale to the Hawaiian Islands; how MARDI is an effort to get beyond the limits of the adventure form; how REDBURN is Melville's effort to capture urban misery, a la his contemporary Dickens; and how WHITE-JACKET is an implicit reference to slavery. This approach, in other words, places Melville's work within his historical period, as well as shows how an increasingly frustrated mid-list author tried to connect to an audience. At the same time, Delbanco provides very interesting critical commentary on MOBY DICK, BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER, BENITO CERENO, and BILLY BUDD. This has the effect of making me want to return to these great texts, which I last read before my children were born. (Don't ask.) The literary commentary, by the way, is sometimes hilarious. Here are some examples, with Delbanco discussing PIERRE: o "At the beginning of the novel, when Pierre is skipping through the vernal hills crooning nature hymns... he seems a nineteenth-century Tiny Tim doing his eyeball-rolling rendition of `Tiptoe Through the Tulips'." o "Pierre is Ahab gone camp." o "In PIERRE, Melville somehow managed to produce both a serious anatomy of the radical imagination that anticipates Dostoyevsky's THE POSSESSED and a manic burlesque that looks toward Gore Vidal's MYRA BRECKENRIDGE." Finally, Delbanco tells the sketchy story of Melville's difficult personal life, which was dispiriting and harrowing, even as he produced his great works. It's truly sad to read about such an amazing talent in his obscure and dark defeat.

Is there anything quite like a great biography? A great novel, you say, and I'd agree, but where are they? Meanwhile, we have these marvelous pieces of writing: Ellmann's biography of Joyce, Edel's biography of James, Holroyd on Shaw. This is not a multi-volumed immortal masterpiece but it has all of the characteristics of such a work, save exhaustiveness. This is an introduction, really, more than a complete life, but it serves its purpose as well as can be imagined. The prose style is inviting and easy, the illustrations amusing and pointedly relevant and revealing. The author's point of view is strikingly original. He begins not with Melville's birth, but with his reputation, from his death to the present. American's do not have a great dramatist, so we have made the drama of Melville's life a kind of literary drama surrounding a masterpiece, "Moby Dick." Those who know and love it see it as one of the great pieces of literature of all time. Melville is cast in the role of the likable genius, the sympathetic artist, the neglected and scorned master of American prose. We've been taught to love him, as we have been instructed to hate Hemingway and other dead white male authors. My professor said that Melville wasn't worth reading and recommended in its stead a collection of slave testimony and the lost poems of a female mill worker. I ventured that perhaps I could read him myself and make up my own mind. We live in an odd age that resents greatness. Let's applaud Delbanco's effort to set the record straight.

This biography of Melville is as balanced, accessible, and thoroughly entertaining as a biography of a literary figure can get while still being considered "serious." Delbanco has a great skills as a writer himself, skillfully juggling the story of Melville's life, critical discussions of his writing, and finally the social and historical context of the works. The discussions of the books are excellent, particularly Delbanco's readings of the novels Moby Dick, Typee, and Pierre. But where this biography particularly stands out is the intermeshing the books with aspects of 19th century American literary culture. There are, for instance, interesting discussions of the dominance of English publishing houses, of copyright issues, of publishing in general. Delbanco situates Melville's work before a backdrop of a nation in transition (for example the story "Benito Cereno" is published in midst of the debate about the expansion of slavery into Kansas territory), and before a backdrop of the city of New York under transition too. Finally, Delbanco discusses the unusual trajectory of Melville's own career and reputation - from almost being forgotten at the time of his death to the towering position he holds in American letters today. This biography is a great summary of Melville's life, and also in a broader sense, of 19th century literary culture.

Herman Melville (1819 -- 1893) is one of the writers I have returned to again and again over the course of years. Thus, I was gratified to receive this new book by Andrew Delbanco, "Melville: His Life and Work" (2005) as a gift and to have the opportunity to read it, think again about Melville, and share my thoughts on this site with other readers. Delbanco is Levi Professor in the Humanities and Director of American Studies at Columbia University. He has published widely on American literature, including a book titled "Required Reading: why our American Classics matter now." Before reading Professor Delbanco's Melville study, I also read the lengthy review by Frederick Crews in the December 1, 2005, "New York Review" which is both laudatory and critical. The literature on Melville continues to grow, and in recent years biographies have been published that are longer and far more detailed than Professor Delbanco's. But Delbanco's study is accessible, engagingly written, and concentrates, as the subtitle to his book implies, in placing Melville in the historical context of Nineteenth Century America, and on the works themselves. I will discuss each of these factors briefly. As to Nineteenth Century America, Professor Delbanco discusses Melville's roots as the descendant, on both sides of his family, of heroes of the Revolutionary War. He gives a revealing picture of pre-Bellum America and of the seafaring life. He gives a detailed historical discussion, for a literary biography, of the tumults which split the United States and lead to the Civil War, including the War with Mexico, the compromises of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Professor Delbanco shows how Melville responded to both the literary and political events of his time. He also gives a good, if briefer, treatment of the Civil War and of Melville's life thereafter, as the United States expanded and a crude materialism became dominant. But most vividly, Professor Delbanco gives a picture of New York City, both before and after the Civil War, and argues convincingly for the strong formative influence that the city exerted on Melville's writings. As to Melville's writings, Professor Delbanco devotes a great deal of space to Melville's four widely-recognized masterpieces: Moby Dick, Bartelby, Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd. He offers textual exposition, compositional background, and a good literary sense of the complexities and ambiguities in each of these works. He offers shorter yet rewarding discussions of several of Melville's more controversial efforts, including Pierre, The Confidence Man, his collection of Civil War Poetry called Battle Pieces, and the long poem Clarel. I think that Delbanco undervalues some of the poetry, particularly Battle Pieces which I have found over the years a provocative literary guide to the Civil War. The treatment of Melville's life is interrelated well with a study of his works, as Professor Delbanco gives succint discussions of

Melville is something of an enigma, as if his brief and quickly declining career were a stage for the apparition called Moby Dick, most likely the Great American Novel, and one of the few novels ever written to approach the tragic mode in the true sense. This brisk and not overly detailed biography is a good lean introduction to the life, or what's known of it, and thus a fitting portrait of the secret intensity of the man behind his sluggish career as a writer. None of which matters beside the magnificence of the greatest of all sea yarns.