Michael Dirda
Herman Melville turns out to be the big one that almost got away.
By Michael Dirda
Sunday, September 25, 2005; Page BW15
MELVILLE
His World and Work
By Andrew Delbanco
Knopf. 415 pp. $30
The life and afterlife of Herman Melville (1819-1891) present the greatest illustration in American literature, perhaps in world literature, of the Psalm "The same stone which the builders refused is become the head-stone." After the popular success of Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), which led to the young Melville being dubbed "the man who lived among cannibals," he embarked on a literary career that went gradually, then precipitously, downhill. By the time he was 40 he had essentially abandoned fiction altogether, tried publishing poetry with comparable success (i.e., none), and finally resigned himself -- he was, after all, married, with four children and debts -- to spending the rest of his life as a customs inspector for the city of New York. When he died, the newspaper obituary misprinted his name as "Henry Melville."
His work was never entirely forgotten, though he was chiefly regarded as a writer of sea stories (Joseph Conrad, another specialist in "the watery part of the world," didn't think much of them). And then in the 1920s a Melville revival unexpectedly kicked into gear. In 1921, Raymond Weaver brought out the first biography ( Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic ); in 1923, D.H. Lawrence devoted more pages to Melville in his dithyrambic Studies in Classic American Literature than to any other writer ("a deep, great artist"); in 1924, the rediscovered Billy Budd was published; and by the 1930s the poet Charles Olson had begun to track down the dispersed volumes of Melville's library in New York's used bookshops. More and ever more scholarly work appeared as teachers and critics of every theoretical bent discovered an oceanic textual richness and complexity in his masterpiece, Moby-Dick (1851). After World War II the suspicion, then conviction grew ever stronger that Melville's titanic meditation on Good and Evil, and almost everything else (except romantic love), just might be that elusive White Whale of our literature, the great American novel.
For anyone who cares about writing (or any of the arts), Melville's story is obviously both dispiriting and consoling. It is also a story that Andrew Delbanco tells surpassingly well.
More:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/22/AR2005092200992.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
