A Stoic of the Underground

It’s hard to know where to pin the blame. Although Herman Melville had proudly titled his new novel “Moby-Dick,” the British publishers, for marketing reasons and without his knowledge, changed it in November 1851 to “The Whale.”

Worse, when Melville shipped the manuscript across the Atlantic Ocean, the last page got so smushed that it was never printed. It was instantly an author’s deepest nightmare, leading the way for reviewers to denounce the book, calling its conclusion “hastily, weakly and obscurely managed.” In fact, it was a number of years before British readers learned that Ishmael had survived the attack of the white whale.

Critical respect was impossible for Melville to achieve in his lifetime. Because his first novels, “Typee” (1846) and “Omoo” (1847), were deemed risque and ribald, he was pigeonholed as an adventure writer of seafaring potboilers. The mere mention of his name in London and New York literary circles in the 1840s conjured images of breezy palm trees, deadly typhoons, cannibals stirring pots and naked Polynesian women.

The notion that he could write a novel that might equal the stature of Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House,” for instance, was deemed ludicrous, and many American newspapers, taking their intellectual cues from London, joined the denunciation. It wasn’t the story of the white whale they objected to: It was the pages upon pages of Melville’s biblical exegesis, philosophical musings and allegorical tricks. Even Melville’s friends gossiped about his unredeemable “failings,” instead of celebrating what we now consider the soaring triumph of “Moby-Dick.”

There was, however, one instant admirer of “Moby-Dick”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom Melville had dedicated his masterpiece. “A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book,” Melville wrote to the well-respected author of “The Scarlet Letter,” upon receiving a letter of appreciation, now lost, from Hawthorne. “You were archangel enough to despise the imperfect body, and embrace the soul.”

The two men, who both lived near Lenox, Mass., had formed a mutual respect society. Using the comical pseudonym “By a Virginian Spending July in Vermont,” Melville had penned a rave two-part review of Hawthorne’s “Mosses From an Old Manse” in 1846, his second collection of stories, for the New York Literary World. Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia, catered to the often-rumpled Melville when he stopped by for tea or supper, understanding that his wastrel demeanor was simply an outward manifestation of his poetic inner spirit. They were, in essence, their own Berkshires salon of three.

Therefore, as Hawthorne sat in his secluded cottage where he had written “The House of the Seven Gables,” sleet lashing against his windowpane, inhaling every page of “Moby-Dick,” he knew after only a few chapters that it represented a revolutionary new departure from Melville’s previous books. With pen in hand, he offered to put his considerable reputation on the line and review “Moby-Dick,” bugling to the world that Melville was a native genius.

But Melville asked him not to. He wanted to bask in the “miserly delight” of Hawthorne’s letter; a review would only cheapen the euphoria. “By understanding ‘Moby-Dick’ as a great truth-telling allegory,” one biographer wrote, “Hawthorne had proved himself the ideal audience of one.”

That biographer, of course, is the one scholar who has painstakingly toiled to enhance Melville’s legacy: Hershel Parker, author of “Reading ‘Billy Budd,’” co-editor of the landmark 1967 Norton Critical Edition of “Moby-Dick” and author of a monumental biography of the great 19th century writer.

The first volume--a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize--opened with Melville’s birth in New York City in 1819 and closed in the dining room of the Little Red Inn in Lenox in November 1851 with Melville presenting Hawthorne with an inscribed copy of “Moby-Dick.” Now, in “Herman Melville: A Biography: Vol. 2, 1851-1891,” Parker picks up with Hawthorne reading the novel and ends with Melville’s death in New York City on Sept. 28, 1891, a neglected prophet conscientiously revising the manuscript of “Billy Budd” with arthritic hands while struggling to pay off debts that he had kept hidden from his family.

Parker is a practitioner of biography by exhaustion, for every fact excavated about the life and times of Melville is magnified under his microscope: the death of insignificant cousins, analysis of reviews in uninfluential journals, the various colors of crayon smudges on manuscripts, the family trees of fly-by-night servants. The incessant detail of the narrative is numbing, and Melville, unfortunately, often gets lost in this sea of thoroughness, thrown overboard like his fictional character, Benito Cereno, and drowned in a tidal wave of excessive trivia. But for the reader with patience--and extra time--Parker’s impressive scholarship and a vigorous analysis are cause for celebration. Too often reviewers misuse the word “definitive”; not so in this case. The meticulous Parker has practically reconstructed Melville’s DNA and in doing so has rendered American literature a signal service.

Parker recounts Melville’s chronic bad luck, epic writing binges, failed lectures, surreal visions and troubled marriage. It’s a saga of genius refusing to be derailed. But Parker unearths a plethora of new material, including previously unknown family correspondence and even the title and plot of Melville’s long-lost novel, “The Isle of the Cross.”

Astonishingly, we are presented for the first time with an accurate chronology of when and where Melville wrote his books, poems and stories. Parker also mines recently discovered volumes from Melville’s personal library, many ornamented with handwritten commentary along the margins, and offers fresh insights about the extraordinary breadth of his reading habits. Melville was not only an encyclopedic reader but also an aggressive one, with fine taste in higher literature.

Volume 2 makes important headway in establishing two underappreciated post-”Moby-Dick” novels as classics: “Pierre; or The Ambiguities” (1852), an autobiographical, psychological remembrance of growing up in New York, and “The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade” (1857), a biting satire of American corruption set on the Mississippi River aboard the fictional steamboat Fidele.

Both novels have had profound effects on American culture. “Pierre,” the story of a young romantic incapacitated by self-delusion, became a bible to Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation. Its hero, Pierre Glendinning, became a prototype for the tortured mystic, “just the youth,” as Parker writes, “to mistake an intense expansion of consciousness for the attainment of true wisdom, just the youth, suffused with acknowledged idealism and ambiguously unacknowledged sexual desires, to dare to apply Jesus’ words to actual earthly life.”

And in “The Confidence Man,” Melville conjures up a gallery of charlatans, rogues and tricksters who transform the Father of Waters into the Father of Lies. Their journey from St. Louis to New Orleans is a mockery of frontier mythmaking of the Mike Fink variety. An annoyed Mark Twain wrote “Life on the Mississippi,” in part, to set Melville straight about the virtues of steam-boating.

When the Civil War broke out, Melville abandoned the novel in favor of poetry. Destitution became a way of life. Struggle was all he knew. Desperately trying to support his wife and two daughters (one struggling with mental illness) and cope with the grief of losing a son who died young, he searched for employment only to be rebuffed for both a consular post and a U.S. Navy billet. Broke, he still managed to master the great world poets, particularly Shakespeare and Wordsworth.

“Melville was not reading in order to acquire knowledge for its own sake,” Parker writes, “his evident purpose in reading epics of Western Civilization was to learn how to write great poetry in his own time.” Amazingly enough, Melville succeeded: His first volume of verse, “Battle-Pieces and Aspects of War” (1866), represents, along with the work of Walt Whitman and James Russell Lowell, the finest poetry written during the Civil War. (The longest poem in the first section of “Battle-Pieces,” titled “Donelson,” is a lyrical gem worthy of Robert Burns).

But again the critics hammered away at him, including William Dean Howells, editor of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly. “Mr. Melville’s work possesses the negative virtues of originality in such degree that it not only reminds you of no poetry you have read, but of no life you have known,” Howells sniped. “Is it possible--you ask yourself, after running over all these celebrative, inscriptive, and memorial verses--that there has really been a great war, with battles fought by men or bewailed by women? Or is it only that Mr. Melville’s inner consciousness has been perturbed, and filled with the phantasms of enlistments, marches, fights in the air, parenthetic bulletin-boards, and tortured humanity shedding, not words and blood, but words alone?”

Yet Melville persisted, publishing the extraordinary “Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land” (1876), a theological meditation reflecting his Manichean view of God and conceived during a tour of the Middle East. Other less exemplary volumes followed.

Meanwhile, Melville evolved into a stoic of the underground, shunning friends and shopping in the secondhand stores of Manhattan for provisions. “Melville was living a hidden life,” Parker concludes, “what journalists a decade or so later would begin calling a buried life, away from his old literary associates, almost lost to fame.” When he died at 72, only one newspaper wrote a meaningful obituary.

By the time he had reached 30, an ethereal muse had consumed Melville, and he remained strangely untouched by the literary conventions of his time. Abandoning the commercial success of his early works, Melville had become a dedicated sufferer for art. As a craftsman of what he called the “inside narrative,” he surpassed Hawthorne and went on to challenge Shakespeare, falling just short. Carl Jung, in “The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature” (1967), rightfully deemed “Moby-Dick” the “greatest American novel” and explained why Melville’s entire literary oeuvre offered “the richest opportunities for psychological elucidation.” There was something ghostly or otherworldly about Melville’s prose and poetry, which upon reading often conjured a hallucinogenic effect.

Fittingly, Parker informs us that Melville’s family motto was Denique coelum--Heaven at Last. Religious immortality, Melville believed, could be had if he stayed truthful to his God-ordained task of honest composition. Reading Parker’s biography made me realize that the time has come to amend Ernest Hemingway’s overused dictum that all American literature emanated from one book: “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” We all know that, in truth, it came from Herman Melville’s holy and heavenly hand.