Herman Melville

(1819–1891)

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

(Moby-Dick)

Herman Melville’s reputation as a writer has fluctuated wildly. Although his first literary efforts won him instant popularity and widespread acclaim, this early success soon proved short-lived. The more unconventional his later writings became, the more his public standing declined, so that in the final decades of his life his works were generally unread and he himself was largely forgotten. He died in relative obscurity, and it was not until the 1920s that his critical fortunes revived. Almost overnight his huge but neglected masterwork, Moby Dick, was widely recognized as one of the greatest novels ever composed, while Billy Budd, the much shorter tale on which he was working when he died, was proclaimed as another classic. In the decades since then, Melville’s stature has continually grown, so that today he is considered one of the finest writers the United States has ever produced.

Born on August 1, 1819, in New York City, Herman was the third child (the second son) of Allan Melvill (who spelled his name without a final e) and his wife, Maria Gansevoort. Eventually the family consisted of four sons and four daughters, and life at first was comfortable. Maria, the mother, was a pious woman from a respectable family; her father had been a hero during the Revolutionary War. Allan, meanwhile, was himself of distinguished lineage and had established a successful business, importing fine French merchandise. Even in the weeks immediately after Herman’s birth, however, Allan had begun to complain to relatives that business was stagnant, and although the family moved repeatedly during these years from one pleasant residence to another, Herman’s father incurred increasing debt and had begun to borrow extensively from his relatives. Herman, meanwhile, began attending school at age fi ve and, by age nine, had begun to distinguish himself both in public speaking and in mathematics; he was even selected as a leader and instructor of other students (Allen 21). By 1830, however, Allan Melvill was bankrupt, and so the family relocated to Albany, New York, home of Maria’s family. There Allan took a job as a clerk in a fur store, while young Herman continued to do well in school. However, his life and the lives of his mother and siblings were forever disrupted by the untimely death of Allan Melvill on January 28, 1832, after a bout of pneumonia.

Fortunately Herman’s older brother, Gansevoort (who added a final e to the family name), was now established in the fur business, and Herman, at age 13, also began working as a clerk in a bank his ancestors had helped found and operate. For the time being, the family’s fortunes were stable, and Herman, during these early teenage years, worked not only in the bank but also, during the summer, on a relative’s Massachusetts farm, as well as in his brother’s fur store at the end of the schoolday at the Albany Classical School. At that school he showed a talent for writing, an interest in reading, and a gift for debating, and, with his whole family, he was exposed to Calvinist doctrine through their membership in the local Reformed Dutch Church (Allen 29). Calamity struck the Melvilles again, however, in 1837, when Gansevoort’s business went bankrupt and Gansevoort himself suffered a lengthy nervous breakdown. By this time the family had relocated to the small town of Lansingburgh, near Albany; meanwhile, Herman tried to supplement the family income by teaching school near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where his uncle Thomas lived. Frustrated by this brief experience as an educator, he returned to Lansingburgh to study surveying, with the intention of working as an engineer on the Erie Canal, although eventually nothing came of this plan. In the meantime, he had begun publishing short articles in the local newspaper. By this time, too, he had also begun to think of going to sea, inspired by the stories of a cousin who had recently returned from a lengthy whaling expedition. On June 3, 1839, he joined the crew of a packet ship called the St. Lawrence, which was soon bound for Liverpool, England, where it arrived on July 3. Although dismayed by the grimy, depressing poverty of Liverpool, Melville had now developed his first real taste for life as a sailor.

When he eventually returned to Lansingburgh in fall 1839, Melville found his mother’s financial condition more desperate than ever. Her home was being threatened with foreclosure, and she had been forced to begin selling some of her furniture. After another failed venture as a teacher, Herman, accompanied by a friend, set out in mid-1840 for Illinois, where his uncle Thomas had moved. While there he traveled by steamboat on the Mississippi River (an experience later reflected in his novel The Confidence-Man), but he soon gave up hope of establishing himself in the Midwest, returning in late fall 1840 to New York City, where he now decided to return to sea once more. He headed for New Bedford, Massachusetts, the center of the American whaling industry, and signed on with the Acushnet, a new vessel, whose crew list described him as follows: “Herman Melville: birthplace, New York; age, 21; height, 5 feet 9 ½ inches; complexion complexion, dark; hair, brown” (Allen 48). The ship set sail on January 3, 1841; it headed for the South Atlantic, in search of whales, then made the dangerous passage around the southern tip of South America, eventually reaching the vicinity of the Galá pagos Islands before then sailing to the Marquesas. By this point the ship had already succeeded in capturing and processing a number of whales for their oil, and by this point, too, Melville had already heard stories of a famous and deadly white whale called Mocha Dick or Moby Dick (Allen 49). Life aboard ship was sometimes exciting but also often tedious, hot, strict, and literally unappetizing, and so, not long after the Acushnet reached the Marquesas on June 23, 1842, Melville and a young friend and crewmate named Richard Tobias Greene decided to desert. In early July they managed to escape five miles into the interior of the island where their ship was anchored, and for several weeks an injured Melville lived with the Typee people while Greene sought help. His experiences with these people later formed the basis for his first (and extremely successful) novel, called Typee, which embellished some facts but was effectively written.

Soon after leaving the Typee, Melville was back at sea, having joined on August 9, 1842, the crew of an Australian ship named the Lucy Ann, also in pursuit of whales. Before long, he and more than a dozen other sailors rebelled against an unpopular first mate while the ship was anchored off the coast of Tahiti; Melville and the others were subsequently arrested and confined on shore. When the Lucy Ann set sail again in mid-October, he and his fellow rebels were set free by their indulgent Tahitian jailor. Accompanied by a former fellow crewman, Melville wandered various Tahitian islands for several weeks (an experience that provided the basis for his later novel Omoo) before he eventually signed on with a Nantucket whaler, the Charles and Henry, on November 4, 1842. The ship arrived in Hawaii on April 27, 1843, and Melville was offi cially discharged from its service on May

4. While in Hawaii he worked at a number of jobs (including setting pins in a bowling alley), but on August 17 he joined the crew of a U.S. Navy ship called the United States, where he witnessed severe discipline, including vicious fl oggings. For almost a year the ship sailed the Pacifi c, visiting various ports, before it eventually rounded the tip of South America and returned to the United States, arriving in Boston harbor on October 3, 1844. After being discharged, Melville quickly headed for Lansingburgh, where his family, fascinated by his tales of life at sea, encouraged him to prepare them for publication. By spring 1845 he had fi nished his first long narrative, based loosely on his desertion in the Marquesas. A New York publisher, while recognizing that it was extremely well written, rejected it because it seemed too improbable to be accepted as a true story; a British publisher initially had the same worries but eventually printed the work, as did a different American publisher. Thus Melville’s first book (called Typee in its American edition, with a much longer title in Britain) appeared in February 1846.

Typee was generally well received by the general public and professional critics alike, although some people objected to its satire of Christian missionaries, and others found it hard to accept as a reliable account of true events. Such skepticism was partly quieted when Richard Greene, Melville’s fellow deserter, was interviewed and testifi ed to the book’s basic veracity. In any case, Melville’s career as a successful professional writer was now well launched, and his standing as a popular writer was confirmed with the publication, in spring 1847, of Omoo, based essentially on his wanderings in Tahiti. This book earned him even more money than Typee had and, although he was unsuccessful in seeking a full-time government job in Washington, D.C., that year, he nevertheless felt sufficiently secure financially to marry, on August 4, Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court and a longtime friend of Melville’s own sisters. The young couple set up residence in a home in New York City also occupied by one of Melville’s brothers and his wife, by four of Melville’s unmarried sisters, by Melville’s mother, and, occasionally, by another brother. During these early years of his marriage Melville contributed articles to a local magazine and developed friendships with writers, editors, and publishers. Meanwhile, he read voraciously and had begun working on a new book, Mardi, also set in the South Seas but dramatically different in tone, style, and intent from his first two books. Allegorical, satirical, dark, and highly imaginative, the book, which appeared in spring 1849, disappointed the readers and critics who expected tales of lively adventure from its author’s pen. Melville (who was now a father as well as a husband) quickly produced a new book, Redburn, which was designed to sell. Based on his own first sea voyage to England, it appeared in fall 1849 and was soon followed by another narrative (White-Jacket) calculated to appeal to the same readers who had admired Typee and Omoo. This latest book, which was based on Melville’s service in the U.S. Navy, appeared early in 1850. Melville himself had little respect for either Redburn or White-Jacket; he considered writing them a job to earn cash rather than a serious literary undertaking.

It was during summer 1850 that Melville, while vacationing in Massachusetts, met the noted author Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose dark thoughtfulness made a powerful impression on his new young friend. Melville now began reading Hawthorne’s works with enthusiasm; he admired what he saw as Hawthorne’s unfl inching determination to pursue truth in his writings, even if that truth proved tragic and disturbing. This encounter with Hawthorne could not have occurred at a more propitious time, for Melville had now begun work on a new novel — a book designed to deal with the subject of whaling. As the book evolved and eventually became the masterpiece now known as Moby Dick, it grew to enormous proportions and developed into a work unlike anything Melville himself (or anyone else, for that matter) had ever written before. Into this massive, mighty work, Melville poured all the depths of his mind and soul; it became (in style, scope, subject, and ambition) a kind of prose epic, full of drama and adventure but also full of poetry and profound thought. Melville must have realized as he was fi nishing it that it would never be a “popular” book in the way that most of his earlier works had been, and he was right. After it appeared in fall 1851, it received mixed reviews: Some critics recognized its power, but many others complained about its length, its style(s), and its highly unconventional design. Thus the book that is now considered Melville’s masterwork became, in his own day, the beginning of the end of his popular success.

A different kind of person (or Melville himself just a few years earlier) might have tried to recover from the relative failure of Moby-Dick by producing an appealing potboiler or two. Instead, Melville wrote Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (published in the second half of 1852)—an odd, strange novel, with a perfectly appropriate subtitle, that involves murder, possible incest, and multiple suicides. This book was an even greater failure than Moby-Dick, and Melville’s wife now began to worry about the mental health of her increasingly depressed and exhausted husband. By 1853 he was the father of three children, but his future as a professional author was decidedly uncertain, and efforts to obtain other employment had been unsuccessful. When a fi re at his publisher’s warehouse in December 1853 destroyed most of the remaining copies of his books (books that were no longer selling well, in any case), Melville had even further reason to despair. Fortunately he was able to earn some income between 1853 and 1856 by publishing more than a dozen stories or sketches in magazines. Some of these (including “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno”) were republished in book form in 1856 as The Piazza Tales, and in the previous year Melville had also published a new novel, Israel Potter. However, although both “Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno” are now considered among Melville’s finest works, none of these publications did much to restore his popularity with his contemporaries, and readers of his own day were likewise unimpressed by The Confidence-Man, a cynical, satirical novel set on a Mississippi steamboat and published in spring 1857. In the next three years Melville also failed as a speaker on the lecture circuit, and in 1860 his literary fortunes had sunk so low that he could not secure a publisher for a collection of poems he had written. Another attempt to secure a government job in 1861 was unsuccessful, and in 1862 Melville was badly hurt when he was thrown from a wagon. By this time, of course, the United States was also embroiled in the Civil War, which nearly destroyed the nation. Gloom had thus settled over Melville’s personal life as well as over the life of the country as a whole.

Melville responded to the war by writing a series of poems that were eventually published, in 1866, as Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, but the major piece of good fortune in his life at this time occurred later that year, when he finally secured steady employment as a customs inspector at the port of New York. Melville held this position for the next two decades; it gave him a regular income, but his career as a prominent, published author was now essentially over. For a time in 1867 it seemed as if his wife might leave him, and in fall that year the couple’s eldest son shot and killed himself (whether the death was deliberate or accidental remains unclear). Another son died early in 1886 (not long after Melville’s retirement from his customs post), and the literary offspring Melville produced during these final decades were essentially stillborn: Clarel, a long poem, was published in 1876 thanks to the financial support of a friendly uncle, while his late poetic works John Marr and Other Sailors (1888) and Timoleon (1891) were privately printed in editions of only 25 copies each. When Melville died on September 28, 1891, his passing was largely unnoticed outside his immediate family, and it was not until the “Melville revival” of the 1920s that Billy Budd, one of his last and one of his greatest works of prose, was discovered among his manuscripts and published to wide acclaim. Finally, more than 30 years after his death, Melville had at last begun to achieve widespread public recognition as one of the most thoughtful, most talented, and most provocative authors his nation had yet produced.

CRITICAL OVERVIEWS