Herman Melville 1929

by Lewis Mumford

In this study of Herman Melville's life & thought, the author primarily relied on Melville's own writings, including his letters & some of his notebooks. This work is singularly complete in that part of Melville which most matters: his ideas, his feelings, his urges, his vision of life. Wherever possible, the author uses Melville's own language in describing his state of mind & experience. This is a wonderful biography of the man who is considered the greatest imaginative writer that America has produced, not to mention the author of "Moby Dick."

Genres: Biography, Literature, American

388 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1929

About the author

Lewis Mumford (October 19, 1895 – January 26, 1990) was an American historian and philosopher of technology and science. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a tremendously broad career as a writer that also included a period as an influential literary critic. Mumford was influenced by the work of Scottish theorist Sir Patrick Geddes.

Reviews

[Jon Frankel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm sure there are more scholarly biographies of Melville out there, and Mumford's isn't even the first (though one of the first), but to read this book is to experience the joy of a great writer writing about an0other great. Mumford's thought emerges in the context of Melville's, and this is certainly intellectual and spiritual biography. Mumford's style is that of an almost extinct species: the general intellectual immersed in culture who is not an academic specialist. Mumford is an early environmentalist to be sure, and he has a holistic view of the mind, the body, of cities and culture. He wrote this in 1929, when Melville was just being 'rediscovered'. I use quotes because really, he was only being discovered, since few people read or understood his most important work when he wrote it. Of particular interest is Mumford's analysis of Melville's life AFTER he finished Moby Dick, how he dealt with his failure to gain an audience, how that failure worked out into the darkness of Pierre and The Confidence Man, and how the poetry of the next 35 years charts his resolution. Mumford sees the Civil War as a key turning point both in Melville's life and in the nations. the society that came out of the war was one that had no time for Melville, and which he understood but was appalled by. This book was as pleasurable to read as any of Melville's.

[Ivan Stoner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvelous biography, written in 1929.

It seems trivially obvious, but my goodness is it great to read a biography by an author who actually has interesting things to say. Mumford is not a relative mediocrity writing about an exceptional person, he is an exceptional person and exceptional thinker in his own right. As a result, his take on Melville is not the usual diligent attempt to ferret out the minutiae of his subject's life. It is a synthesis of and expansion on Melville's work in the context of Melville's life, tied together with Mumford's own thinking on the meaning of Melville.

Isn't that a much better model for an author's biography? How many people reading biographies of great authors are reading them to learn the minutiae of the author's day-to-day? Do we really care what Melville had for breakfast on some specific Tuesday? No, we care what can we learn from Melville. How does a combination of Melville's life and work guide our thoughts ? what can it teach us?

Here, Mumford succeeds greatly. Reading his biography is like attending a series of lectures by a brilliant thinker about another brilliant thinker -- and in that vein, it helps to have done the reading. Mumford's bio is best read by people who are already pretty familiar with Melville.

[Saul]

Melville [...] left a happy and successful career behind him, and plunged into those cold black depths, the depths of the sunless ocean, the blackness of interstellar space; and though he proved that life could not be lived under those conditions, he brought back into the petty triumphs of the age the one element that it completely lacked: the tragic sense of life: the sense that the highest human flight is sustained over an unconquered and perhaps an unconquerable abyss.

Moby-Dick, then, is one of the first great mythologies to be created in the modern world, created, that is, out of the stuff of that world, its science, its exploration, its terrestrial daring, its concentration upon power and dominion over nature, and not out of ancient symbols [...] or medieval folk-legends, like Dr. Faustus. Moby-Dick lives imaginatively in the newly broken soil of our own life: its symbols, unlike Blake’s original but mysterious figures, are direct and explicit [...] Moby-Dick thus brings together the two dissevered halves of the modern world and the modern self — its positive, practical, scientific, externalized self, bent on conquest and knowledge, and its imaginative, ideal half, bent on the transposition of conflict into art, and power into humanity.

[Ancient Weaver · Rating 2 out of 5]

Odd biography.

Mumford spends a lot of time summarising/interpreting plots of Melville's books and creating what his own reconstructions of Melville's mental state during events in his life.

Mumford relies more on pure imagination than fact here. Maybe you could get away with that when writing a biography in 1929, but not so much today.

I think this book was published around the time that Melville was being rediscovered and reappraised, so in Mumford's defense, it was pretty much either devote a significant chunk of one's life to building a definitive Melville bio out of raw, primary sources or this.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

More about Melville's writing than about his life. Parts are a slog, especially if you haven't read much Melville.

[BUENAVENTURA BARRI]

Is a good words about Melville

[Michael Crofford · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought his section on Moby Dick was particularly nice. If one were confused as to what Moby Dick was about this would be a great start.

Mumford writes "Moby-Dick is an imaginative synthesis and every aspect of reality belongs to it, one plane modifying the other and creating the modeled whole" . Or even more succinctly : "Scarlett Letter is a melody, Moby Dick is a symphony"

Other biographies are more comprehensive (Parker) , or more modern (Delbarco), but this one I think gives a greater appreciation for Melville's work something which at the time of publication(1929) was beginning to gain traction.

[Mark Valentine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Mumford, reading Melville--it is a marriage of oysters and tomatoes, or a fuji apple with havarti cheese. Mumford's descriptions, his vivid imagination of Melville, his speculative information [sic] I found as eloquent as reading Melville.

In the first third, Mumford relates Melville's youth and first ventures to sea; in the middle third, he carried the narrative across Melville's novels until arriving at the final third, the author's passive glide into quiet years of faded esteem.

I loved Mumford's golden touch though. I felt that the docent was doubling as the painter. This is a highly recommended biography of Melville.

[Mike Blackwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great analysis of Melville's works individually and as a whole. The biography aspect is more interpretive than factual, but it's more interesting this way. You don't really want to know the details of an author's life; you want to know how/why they wrote the books they wrote. Mumford understood that and offers here a literary biography actually worthy of the word 'literary.'

[Peter Farness · Rating 5 out of 5]

Innovative scholarship for the time. I liked his enthusiasm and interest in this. He read at all. A writer I definitely need to read more from.