Not to be damned by dollars
Elizabeth Lowry
HERMAN MELVILLE, VOLUME I, 1819-1851 by Hershel Parker Johns Hopkins, £27.50, pp. 941 Melville biographies are like whales: the bulkier the animal, the more dramatic the splash. At over 900 pages, this is the first part of Hershel Parker's immense two- volume study that will, when complete, rep- resent a quarter of a century's scholarship and should sound rock bottom. Parker is formidably well qualified to tell Melville's story, having previously collaborated on The Melville Log, the painstaking year-by- year inventory of the writer's life that has become the staple of Melville addicts everywhere since it was first published in 1951 (a revised version is due out before the end of the century). In the intervening years he has managed to fill in the remain- ing gaps in our knowledge of Melville's extraordinary career — a phenomenal achievement, given the virtual wreck of Melville's fame by the time of his death in 1891 — and this impressively researched and magnificently readable book is the result.
Born into a distinguished family in post- revolutionary Boston, Melville was to owe his peculiar progress as a writer to a series of personal disasters which impressed on him how little the daily civilities of polite society counted when survival was at stake. It is tempting to trace a reckless streak in his nature to his grandfather, Thomas Melvin (sic), one of the 'apaches' who took part in the Boston Tea Party, the event which precipitated the American Revolu- tion. The war hero's son, Allan, had mar- ried a young woman from a prosperous Albany Knickerbocker family at the end of the Anglo-American war of 1812-14 and looked forward to a comfortable future as a dry-goods merchant after settling in Man- hattan. Herman's parents considered him to be the least promising of their eight chil- dren and while growing up he was always aware of being outshone by his graceful and articulate older brother, Gansevoort. But things were not what they seemed. By the time Herman was 11 his father was bankrupt, having run through his wife's for- tune in a series of careless deals, and his sudden death a year later set the family adrift in a milieu in which it had once been prominent. The practical Gansevoort tried to reattach himself from the inside, starting a cap and fur business in Boston and even- tually securing a post as secretary to the American Legation in London. However, he never recovered from a fall from a rooftop in which his torso was crushed, and died at the age of 31 without having achieved the political success which his mother had anticipated for him.
Not much was expected of Herman. Buckling under the pressure of having to earn his own living, he arrived at a tempo- rary solution by shipping out on a merchantman sailing for Liverpool before joining a whaler bound for the South Seas. When he returned to Boston at the age of 25 he had a strange story to tell about a month he had spent marooned among cannibals in the Typee valley in the Marquesas. While being fed on breadfruit and rowed about in a canoe by naked maidens, he had realised with delighted amazement that the Typee had accom- plished what the civilisation of New Eng- `Jane, your hair is like supeipolydacyylene.' land, in spite of its material wealth, could only dream about: they had perfected the leisure society.
Physically and mentally toughened by his adventures, he was eager to begin his prop- er work, but was untrained for a profession. He thought that he might try his hand at writing. The Typee had spent their days in play and were happy enough, and literature was the most respectable approximation of play which civilisation had to offer.
Having decided to become a novelist, Melville rapidly made his name as a writer of exotic romances, winning notoriety for his sensual account of his island sojourn in Typee. His mother was shocked, perhaps reflecting, as Parker deliciously suggests, that Gansevoort would have written more modestly. Melville's readers were equally disconcerted by a pervasive nihilism in his next two novels, Omoo and Mardi, which needled them with speculations about the random workings of the universe where they had expected to find nothing more than a good yarn.
At sea, it seems, Melville had come into contact with an elemental chaos that answered to a hidden instability in his own make-up. Parker gives us a marvellous sense of his hectic, listing personality, so different in its clumsiness and power from that of his more polished contemporaries, Nathaniel Hawthorne — whom he befriended in a burst of sympathy in 1850 and later alienated through his outspoken- ness — and Washington Irving. Having accused Irving of slavishly imitating Euro- pean models in his stories, Melville began to question the conservative tradition that had shaped his own writing. In 1851 his search for a more flexible and democratic form of expression resulted in his colossal poetic epic, Moby-Dick. Part philosophical meditation on the indifference of the natu- ral world to man, part literary manifesto written in exuberant, sprawling prose, the book's sheer individualism made it not only the greatest but also the most representa- tive of American novels, and changed the face of the genre forever.
As far as Melville's public was con- cerned, however, this whaling tale that rambled on about free will and the demon- ic energies of the cosmos, when it should have been talking about whales, was the last straw. After his marriage in 1847 to Elizabeth Shaw, he quite literally couldn't afford to be indifferent to the public's demands, and was increasingly forced to write to order while becoming ever more resentful at having to do so. By 1867 he was exhausted by the strain of the career he had chosen, and his family was convinced of his insanity. The first volume of this leviathan of a biography leaves Melville at 32, determined, as he explained to Hawthorne, not to be 'damned by dollars'. His long struggle to defend his idiosyn- crasies in the face of mounting material pressures still lies ahead. Volume II will be worth waiting for.
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