Melville: His World and Work - Hardcover

Delbanco, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375403140 ISBN 13: 9780375403149

Publisher: Knopf, 2005

Synopsis

With Moby-Dick Herman Melville set the standard for the Great American Novel, and with “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd he completed perhaps the greatest oeuvre of any of our writers. Now Andrew Delbanco, hailed by Time as “America’s best social critic,” uses unparalleled historical and critical perspective to give us both a commanding biography and a riveting portrait of the young nation.

The grandson of Revolutionary War heroes, Melville was born into a family that in the fledgling republic had lost both money and status. Half New Yorker, half New Englander, and toughened at sea as a young man, he returned home to chronicle the deepest crises of his era, from the increasingly shrill debates over slavery through the bloodbath of the Civil War to the intellectual and spiritual revolution wrought by Darwin. Meanwhile, the New York of his youth, where letters were delivered by horseback messengers, became in his lifetime a city recognizably our own, where the Brooklyn Bridge carried traffic and electric lights lit the streets.

Delbanco charts Melville’s growth from the bawdy storytelling of Typee—the “labial melody” of his “indulgent captivity” among the Polynesians—through the spiritual preoccupations building up to Moby-Dick and such later works as Pierre, or the Ambiguities and The Confidence-Man, His Masquerade. And he creates a vivid narrative of a life that left little evidence in its wake: Melville’s peculiar marriage, the tragic loss of two sons, his powerful friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne and scores of literary cronies, bouts of feverish writing, relentless financial pressure both in the Berkshires and in New York, declining critical and popular esteem, and ultimately a customs job bedeviled by corruption. Delbanco uncovers autobiographical traces throughout Melville’s work, even as he illuminates the stunning achievements of a career that, despite being consigned to obscurity long before its author’s death, ultimately shaped our literature. Finally we understand why the recognition of Melville’s genius—led by D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster, and posthumous by some forty years—still feels triumphant; why he, more than any other American writer, has captured the imaginative, social, and political concerns of successive generations; and why Ahab and the White Whale, after more than a century and a half, have become durably resounding symbols not only here but around the world.

About this title

About the Author:

Andrew Delbanco is the author of The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil, Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now, and The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope, all of which were New York Times Notable Books. The Puritan Ordeal won the Lionel Trilling Award from Columbia University. He has edited Writing New England, The Portable Abraham Lincoln, volume two of The Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson (with Teresa Toulouse), and, with Alan Heimert, The Puritans in America. His essays appear regularly in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Raritan, and other journals.

In 2001 Delbanco was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2003 was named New York State Scholar of the Year by the New York Council for the Humanities. He is a trustee of the National Humanities Center and the Library of America and has served as vice president of PEN American Center. Since 1995 he has been the Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

1.

He was born on August 1, 1819, into good circumstances. But his parents lacked the money to stay there, and so they turned, at no small cost to their dignity, to their elders for help. On his mother’s side, the benefactor was Maria’s father, Peter Gansevoort, a towering man (six foot three in an age when six-footers were rare) famous for having commanded the defense of Fort Stanwix, an outpost guarding the trade route from the Great Lakes, during the British siege of 1777. There is a tendency today to think of the Revolutionary War as a dispute among bewigged gentlemen who sent men into battle with inaccurate guns to the martial music of fife and drum; in fact, it was a brutal war whose combatants literally tasted sweat and blood flung from the bodies of their enemies as they slashed at each other with bayonets. It was not uncommon for wounded soldiers to be stabbed through and left to bleed to death “like sieves,” or to have their brains dashed out with “barbarity to the utmost” by the musket butts of the advancing enemy. Melville was to write about this war in the novel Israel Potter, in which he described the Yankee defenders at Bunker Hill gripping their muskets by the barrel and beating back the British assault by “wielding the stock right and left, as seal-hunters on the beach, knock down with their clubs the Shetland seal.”

Melville’s Gansevoort grandfather was known for his valor in the face of superior numbers of enemy troops. At Fort Stanwix, having refused to receive a verbal message from the officer in charge of the British assault, he was presented with a written ultimatum to surrender “exhibiting in magnificent terms . . . the strength of the [British] army . . . and the hopeless situation of the garrison,” to which he replied with formal contempt:

Sir:—In answer to your letter of today’s date, I have only to say, that it is my determined resolution, with the forces under my command to defend this fort, at every hazard, to the last extremity, in behalf of the United American States, who have placed me here to defend it against all their enemies.

I have the honor to be, Sir, Your most obedient and humble servant, Peter Gansevoort, Col., Commanding Fort Stanwix

This immovable eighteenth-century gentleman lived out his years in Albany. Upon his death in 1812, seven years before his grandson Herman was born, Peter Gansevoort’s assets were passed on to his son Peter Junior, along with the obligation to look after his sister Maria and her unborn children.

On the Melville side, too, there was a modest fortune, and Herman’s father, Allan, did his best to tap it. Allan’s father, Major Thomas Melvill, was also a celebrated veteran of the Revolution, accustomed to being greeted on the streets of Boston with bows of deference.* In 1831, when the deference was turning to pity, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes made a little verse sketch of him called “The Last Leaf”:

My grandmamma has said— Poor old lady; she is dead Long ago— That he had a Roman nose, And his cheek was like a rose In the snow

But now his nose is thin, And it rests upon his chin Like a staff, And a crook in his back, And a melancholy crack In his laugh.

One basic fact linked the lives of Melville’s grandfathers: both had been born English and had become, by violence, American. On childhood visits to Boston, Herman heard war stories directly from Thomas Melvill, who still wore his “old three-cornered hat, / And the breeches, and all that,” and proudly showed his grandson the vial containing tea leaves brushed from his clothes after he had taken part in the Boston Tea Party dressed in Indian garb and warpaint. Though he never knew his maternal grandfather, Herman learned about “the hero of Fort Stanwix” from his mother and uncles, and doubtless had him in mind for the portrait, in Pierre, of “grand old Pierre Glendinning”—a massive man who, “during a fire in the old manorial mansion, with one dash of his foot . . . had smitten down an oaken door,” and “in the wilderness before the Revolutionary War . . . had annihilated two Indian savages by making reciprocal bludgeons of their heads.”

If Melville’s grandfathers were holdovers from the glorious past, his father lived in a fanciful future. Born in Boston, Allan Melvill wooed his bride from a venerable Dutch patroon family in Albany, then moved to the fast-growing city of New York. Having made the Grand Tour of Europe as a young man, he became an import merchant specializing in what today we would call accessories—a “deluxe Mr. Micawber,” as James Wood has aptly called him—with the groundless optimism of someone proficient at deceiving himself. He was always counting on this or that “confidential Connexion” to deliver a windfall, or assuring his creditors that some long-pending deal was about to close. “My prospects brighten,” he wrote in 1820 to his own father when Herman was not yet a year old, “& without being over sanguine, I may be allowed to indulge, under the blessing of Heaven, anticipations of eventual success.”

Allan was being over-sanguine, and everyone knew it—though for a time his bravado almost convinced the world that his failures were temporary and his successes deferred. By all accounts, he had an eye for quality. An advertisement he placed in 1824 in a New York newspaper gives an idea of his inventory: “Fancy Hdfks. and Scarfs . . . Elastic and Silk Garters, Artificial Flowers, Cravat Stiffners, &c. Also in store . . . rich satin striped and figured blk Silk Vestings, Gros de Naples Hdkfs, Belt and Watch Ribbons, 7–16 & 7–22 Silk Hose . . . Horse Skin Gloves . . . Cologne and Lavender Waters, &c.” He could switch easily into the visitor’s native language when a Frenchman entered his store, and he furnished his home with mementoes of his European travels, whose provenance he loved to detail for friends over a glass—or two—of old cognac.

But the yield from his talents was meager. Year by year, Allan turned his life into an almost sordid tale of reckless borrowing and groveling appeals for cash to carry him through to the next promised bonanza. He never became at ease in the increasingly impersonal system whereby European exports were sold in bulk to American auction houses, from which they were bought by wholesalers and distributed to the retail trade—a business in which good taste and personal charm counted for less than the ability to anticipate rising markets by buying low and falling prices by selling high. Following the trade agreements with Britain that settled the War of 1812, something like the frantic rhythm of modern commodities markets developed, and Allan Melvill was unprepared. Nearly forty years later, aspects of Allan turn up in his son’s portrait, in White-Jacket, of an effete Commodore’s secretary who looks like an “ambassador extraordinary from Versailles,” and whose prized possessions include “enamelled pencil-cases” and “fine French boots with soles no thicker than a sheet of scented notepaper.”

If Melville’s father was always off on some flighty new venture, his mother was a woman of gravity. Daughter of a respected family with roots in the quasi-feudal aristocracy of the Hudson Valley, Maria Gansevoort had grown up speaking Dutch with her parents, who provided her with the years of music and dancing lessons essential to a young lady of breeding who was expected to make herself gracious and decorative. But she was trained as well in the severe Protestantism of her ancestors, and remained wary all her life of placing too much faith in the things of this world lest they be snatched away. Especially in the months after giving birth, which she did eight times, she was given to moodiness, and though she wanted her own children to master such worldly arts as penmanship and deportment, she was at pains to prepare their souls for deprivation and death.

It was from Maria that Herman received the rudiments of a religious education. Although she chastised him well into adulthood for his spotty church attendance, and he was never what we would call “observant,” the ultimate questions posed by religion never lost their hold on his imagination. Maria, who knew the Bible in Dutch as well as English, brought biblical stories, exempla, and precedents into the lives of all her children, and for her second son characters from the Bible always remained as vividly alive as the worthies and villains of his own time. Ishmael, Bildad, Ahab, and Elijah are just a few of the names in Moby-Dick by which he invests characters with a priori allegorical significance before they begin to act in his invented world. He ends his great story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” with a quotation from the Book of Job (Bartleby sleeps “with kings and counselors”); and in his final work, Billy Budd, he gives the music of the Bible in a telling variation to Captain Vere, who quotes Acts 17:28, reminding his officers that the “element in which we move and have our being” is not God, but the sea. The pioneer scholar Nathalia Wright counts 250 biblical allusions in Moby-Dick alone. Melville knew the Bible so well, she writes, that “he could smell the burning of Gomorrah, and the pit; hear the trumpet in the Valley of Jehoshaphat and . . . taste Belshazzar’s feast.”

In the early years when he heard travelers’ tales from his father and Bible stories from h...

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0375403140
• ISBN 13: 9780375403149
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448