Beyond Melville the literary legend

A few days after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, I heard a report that a station had been set up at the Lexington Avenue Armory at 26th Street to provide information on the dead and missing. A mild embarrassment came over me, because at a time of national tragedy I was having a literary association: There’s a plaque on the armory commemorating the fact that Herman Melville lived there. In a house on that site, Melville wrote “Clarel,” “Timoleon” and “Billy Budd,” and there he died, virtually forgotten, in September of 1891.

Associations grew in the months ahead. There is the newspaper headline that Ishmael imagines reading in the first chapter of “Moby-Dick”: “Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States / Whaling Voyage by One Ishmael / Bloody Battle in Afghanistan.” The coincidences (including the biblical Ishmael’s role as father of the Arab people) were disturbing. Others noticed this convergence and wrote about it. Likewise, in “Melville: His World and Work,” Andrew Delbanco, who teaches American literature at Columbia University, observes that Capt. Ahab’s monomaniac pursuit of the white whale has everywhere been appropriated as a symbol for political fanaticism.

Delbanco’s engaging, comprehensive and well-written biography focuses primarily on Melville’s work, asserting its undeniable presence in our literary consciousness as well as our popular culture. He provides much necessary and useful background about Melville’s family and working life, about which relatively little is known. He avoids overindulging in speculation about Melville’s marriage and sexuality, although the questions are there for those who wish to consider them in light of Melville’s work -- particularly the fascinating oscillations of his novel “Pierre, or the Ambiguities.” Delbanco’s study is also richly textured with insights from some of the best Melville critics of the last half century.

His own contribution to understanding Melville’s enormously diverse and complex work is less biographical than historical and political. He sees “Moby-Dick” largely as an allegory of antebellum America, with the fiery, skeletal, pro-slavery Sen. John C. Calhoun as Capt. Ahab. While he argues plausibly that certain references would have satirized the political moment and been recognized by readers at the time, those readings seem almost as trivial as equating Ahab with George W. Bush (or Donald H. Rumsfeld, or name your politician).

Melville’s contempt for slavery and racism is indeed palpable, and Delbanco is surely correct when he points out that the masterful short story “Benito Cereno” reveals in the naivete of its protagonist, Capt. Amasa Delano, “the kind of moral opacity that seems still to afflict America as it lumbers through the world creating enemies whose enmity it does not begin to understand.” But he is a little too eager to turn Melville into a finger-wagging liberal warning of the evils of totalitarianism and American imperialism. Delbanco’s focus on “Benito Cereno” as a political allegory about slavery blinds him to Melville’s insight into history’s endless cycles of power and oppression as well as the universal human capacity for evil. Babo, the leader of the slaves’ shipboard rebellion, was, after all, the slave of black men in his homeland, and in the end proves as merciless as his oppressors.

Melville is far too distant from politics, and his books are much too psychologically complex and multi-vocal to sustain a one-dimensional political interpretation. Readers of “Moby-Dick” and such baffling works as “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “The Confidence-Man” tend to be surprised by their unresolved contradictions and their author’s shifting allegiances and trickster elusiveness. One of the ironies of Delbanco’s emphasis on politics is his failure to see it at work in “Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War” (1866), Melville’s first published book of poems. Delbanco faults the book both for its lack of authenticity (“Melville was not there to hear the screams and see the body parts fly”) and its failure fully to address slavery. He relies too much on the dismissive readings of earlier critics, including Edmund Wilson (though Delbanco does better than Elizabeth Hardwick, who in her presumptuous and incompetent 2000 biography all but ignores the poetry).

But as Melville stated in his preface, much of “Battle-Pieces” was occasioned by the fall of Richmond; slavery was no longer a political focus. His rhetorical aim was an attempt to remind both sides, particularly the North, of the enormous sacrifice exacted in the conduct of the war (Delbanco misses the irony of the book’s dedication “to the memory of the three hundred thousand who in the war for the maintenance of the Union fell devotedly under the flag of their fathers”) and to prevent continued enmity and bitterness in the peace. There is no account at all of some of the greatest poems of the American Civil War -- “The March Into Virginia,” “The Swamp Angel,” “On the Slain Collegians,” the one-sentence masterpiece “Shiloh” or “Donelson’s” bold experimental handling of broken newspaper accounts to show the ungraspable nature of war. And Delbanco seems blind to the prophetic vision of “Formerly a Slave.”

True, the poems in “Battle-Pieces” have none of the expansive, operatic rhythms of “Moby-Dick.” But Melville understood that in capturing such vast suffering and devastation, and in grieving for the 300,000 boys moldering in American fields, using the language of his novels and of previous elegiac poetry would have been tactless. (It is what Lincoln understood at Gettysburg.) In his Civil War poetry, Melville sought and found a new language with which to grieve and to question war, and Delbanco unfortunately remains deaf to it.

Delbanco has a similar difficulty with Melville’s late narrative poem, “Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land”: He views this 10-year project as something Melville undertook to avoid depression after the collapse of his literary career. Rather, the work is deeply revealing not only of American religion in the post-Reconstruction era but also of questions that haunted Melville throughout his work. Delbanco is right in recognizing (though the poem’s conclusion makes it clear) that this 18,000-line narrative addresses the problem of faith in the wake of the Darwinian revolution. “Clarel” remains one of the most powerful expressions of the struggle between knowledge and faith in the modern world, a struggle that haunts all of Melville’s works.

While there is great risk in simplifying Melville, his quest seems to have been to discover who first dreamed of God and who or what then made people worship and sacrifice in his name. When Melville visited the Egyptian pyramids in 1857, he was gripped by that question: “I shudder at the idea of ancient Egyptians. It was in these pyramids that was conceived the idea of Jehovah. Terrible mixture of the cunning and awful.” Readers of “Moby-Dick” well know Melville’s allusions to the whale’s “pyramidical white hump” and “pyramidical silence.” In Melville’s view, the story of America, for Puritans and founders alike, was a reenactment of Exodus; the question for him was whether or not Exodus was an enormous failure, perhaps a perpetuation of an evil from which it was born.

In that sense, slavery and the exercise of power would always be part of the story. Christianity only complicated the problem of evil for Melville, and its solutions to the problem only irritated him. In his early flight to the Polynesian islands, in the departure of the Pequod on Christmas Day, in the unholy life of Pierre founding his own church of art, Melville was asking whether at the root of any rebellion against a worn-out (or perhaps wicked) God there is something better: the fire of true divinity. Or is there only a depravity for which language has no name? A relentless hater of all the cruelties committed in the name of God, he still hoped to find some spark of the divine in humankind. He hated Yahweh yet showed the horror of envisioning divinity in the whale. In “Moby-Dick,” old Fleece, the black cook, preaches to sharks over the side of the ship: “You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not’ing more dan de shark well goberned.”

Melville remained to the end a great poet of the shark and drank deep from Gnostic and Manichaean wells. His work “anticipates” (a word overused in the book) neither Freud nor Joyce, as Delbanco would have it, but follows Sophocles and the author of Job, those contemplators of unfathomable terror and evil for whom good guys and bad guys are, sad to say, mere passing embodiments of politics as usual. *

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From Melville: His World and Work

ABOUT a third of the way through Moby-Dick, we come to an extraordinary chapter, “The Quarter-Deck,” in which Melville orchestrates these themes of eros and power into one of the great set pieces in literature about the dynamics of demagoguery. Ahab reveals himself here as the sort of man that Hawthorne described the Reverend Dimmesdale to be in The Scarlet Letter, another powerful orator whose “vocal organ was in itself a rich endowment” capable of swaying his listeners, as a lover does, “to and fro by the mere tone and cadence.” ... It was a time when Americans expected such masters of symphonic speaking as Webster and Calhoun to deliver waves of emotion from piano to fortissimo, with plenty of vibrato along the way.... To us, there is something ridiculous about the gesticulating man with stentorian voice, [but] in Melville’s time the orator was a democratic hero, and Ahab, deploying what one critic calls his “language of the screamer,” was among the best of them.