Nearly a burnt-out case

Caroline Moore

MELVILLE: HIS WORLD AND HIS WORK by Andrew Delbanco Picador, £25, pp. 415, ISBN 033037107X ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Would-be artists clinging to the belief that they are in possession of strangely unrecognised genius draw comfort from the thought of Van Gogh. For struggling writers, the biography of Herman Melville is almost equally potent.

In some ways, indeed, it is even more poignant, for it is one of early success; early glamour, after the publication of Typee in 1846, as ‘the man who lived among cannibals’; abundant early promise that, in the eyes of contemporaries, merely fizzled out. He wrote published fiction for only 12 years of his 72 years, to increasingly bad reviews and poor sales: when he died, his last work, Billy Budd: Foretopman, was an unpublished manuscript.

His last novel was published in 1857, when he was only 38, and the rest of his life is sad reading. Melville — almost hyperactive in his youth; joining whalers and warships, and jumping ship; devouring books with the keen, obsessive appetite of a genuine autodidact; revelling in his ability to titillate with highly coloured tales of naked and welcoming Polynesian beauties; linguistically and imaginatively ebullient seemed to run out of energy.

Some of the most painful passages in this book describe Melville’s dismal attempts to scrape a living on the lecture circuit. As one of his audience complained, his voice struggled even to get ‘through his moustache’, emerging ‘about as loud and with as much force as the creaking of a field-mouse through a thick hedge’. ‘Some read books and newspapers,’ wrote one reviewer; ‘some sought refuge in sleep, and some, to their praise be it spoken, seemed determined to use it as an appropriate occasion for selfdiscipline in the blessed virtue of patience.’ Tormented by spiritual and creative sterility, he drank too much, and seems to have become occasionally violent towards his wife, to whose family he was humiliatingly in debt. In 1866, he became a govern ment drudge: a four-dollar-a-day Deputy Customs Inspector, ‘clinging like a weary but tenacious barnacle’, as his son-in-law put it, to the office on the Hudson Bay pier.

He outlived both his sons. His eldest, Malcolm, died in 1867, aged only 18, from a self-inflicted gun-shot — just possibly accidental. His second son, Stanwix, ‘who had failed at everything from the wholesale business to dentistry’, died in 1886, ‘alone in a San Francisco hotel’.

When Melville died, in 1891, he was virtually forgotten. Even Moby-Dick had been out of print for years (he received his last royalty statement in 1887, 11 years after the last reprint). His death notice in the New York Times listed him as ‘Henry Melville’.

Delbanco traces this downward trajectory with sympathy, and is particularly good at suggesting how the gap between the hopes, ambitions and idealism of youth — the dreams of ‘an insolent young writer full of scepticism toward all authorities’ — and the disillusionments of maturity shape Melville’s greatest works. He becomes, in Delbanco’s phrase, ‘a reformed, if not repentant, romantic, who saw the fragility as well as the deformity of culture’. In the wake of the deaths of his sons, he wrote his last masterpiece, in which an innocent young man, Billy Budd, is doomed to death by the letter of the law, yet the captain that condemns him, acting against his fatherly impulses, is portrayed as upright and even noble.

Yet Melville wrote nothing that has survived that directly speaks of his feelings about his loss. Delbanco, indeed, is hampered throughout by the usual problem of every Melville biographer. Like his fictional scrivener, Bartleby, ‘no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of the man’. There is, for example, only one letter to his wife extant. Necessarily, then, Delbanco has placed his emphasis on Melville’s own writing, ‘and on its complex connections to the intellectual and political context in which he lived and worked’.

Writers who set out to resurrect what Hawthorne called a ‘home-feeling for the past’ may do so by evoking the sensual and emotional everyday textures of an age. There are some good touches of this in Delbanco’s work, chiefly in his descriptions of New York. Beguiled by these, I confess I would have liked even more about conditions on board whaling ships, for example. Delbanco, however, chiefly charts the intellectual and political debates and divisions of this crisis-ridden age, particularly the debates over slavery. Contemporary ambiguities, reflected in Melville’s fiction, are illuminated by contemporary cases — such as Melville’s own father-in-law, once praised by abolitionists as ‘pure, fearless and upright’, who found himself compelled as a judge to uphold the Fugitive Slave Law.

Delbanco avoids any rigid or reductive identification of characters in the novels. He mentions the powerful case to be made for suggesting that the monomaniacal South Carolinian, John C. Calhoun, might be one model for Captain Ahab; yet there is a flexibility, or even slipperiness, about whether Moby-Dick became ‘a book about politics’, as Delbanco claims in one breath, or, as he says in the next, is only ‘a book that lent itself to political interpretations’.

This hesitation between what might be intended in the text and what might be retrospectively read into it does not worry Delbanco: one of his themes, indeed, is the near-mythic comprehensiveness of a figure like Ahab, whose fanaticism can be redefined for every generation.

One becomes uneasier, however, when reading back involves discovering the ‘true’, private Melville through his novels. Delbanco, mercifully, is far more circumspect here than many of the flamboyantly Freudian and overtly homosexual critics who boil down the corpse of Moby-Dick. Melville has been claimed by the gay community (‘every positive depiction of sexuality in Melville is a depiction of male masturbation’): what, indeed, is really going on in the spermaceti-squeezing scene aboard the Pequod?

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me ... Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did that avocation beget.

Delbanco, however, does observe that the passage ‘is less freighted with sexual meaning in its 19th-century idiom than it might seem today’, and wonders ‘whether this attribution of homosexual feeling is an overdue acknowledgment of something of which Melville was aware or a projection on the part of gay readers’.

Still, this is a small clearing in the wild jungle of interpretation, and Delbanco lets a few tendrils of speculation snake in. Almost anything, of course, can be described as sexual, from the listeners who ‘droop’ after Father Mapple’s sermon (which is, apparently, ‘like post-coital exhaustion, his audience having been gratefully violated by his words’), through some ‘phallic’ chimneys, to a girl’s ear, which is firmly labelled ‘vaginal’.

In general, Delbanco shuns the wilder shores of Freudianism. And through the last sections of the biography, the ‘tornadoed Atlantic’ of Melville’s despair does flicker into life: exhausted, obsessive, as Hawthorne described him, ‘wandering to-and-fro over the deserts’ of ‘dismal and monotonous’ theological speculation. Hawthorne, surely, offers the most succinct summing up of Melville: ‘He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to do one or the other.’