Herman Melville

by Newton Arvin

This compelling biography of Herman Melville, one of America's most enigmatic literary figures, recounts a life full of adventure, hardship, and moral conflict. The grandson of two wealthy Revolutionary War heroes, Melville spent the first years of his affluent childhood in New York City, until his father went suddenly bankrupt in 1830, moved the family upstate, and died shortly thereafter. Melville escaped to sea in his early twenties, sailing first to England, then to Polynesia, where he found himself fleeing from cannibals, joining a mutiny, and frolicking with naked islanders. Much of his writing was based on his nautical adventures, but his novels were, for the most part, unsuccessful and misunderstood. His only close friend was Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he dedicated Moby-Dick. Later in life, Melville had to accept work as a low-level customs agent to support his wife and children. Newton Arvin's eminently readable biography beautifully captures the troubled, often reclusive man whose major works include Typee, Omoo, "Bartleby the Scrivener," Billy Budd, and his indisputable masterpiece, Moby-Dick. This winner of the 1950 National Book Award, Herman Melville is "the wisest and most balanced single piece of writing on Melville" -- The New York Times "....a superb exercise of critical scholarship and an ornament to American letters." -- Saturday Review of Literature

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1950

Reviews

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I ended up with a copy of Newton Arvin’s book on Herman Melville quite by accident after ordering what I thought was going to be 'Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle', a collection of letters to and from the author edited by Eleanor Melville Metcalf. It seems both share an ISBN in some listings; anyway, given my temperament, and the fact that both seem equally difficult to obtain, I kept the Arvin book and didn’t complain.

I don’t know that Arvin is much read these days. Amazon suggests that his criticism is pretty much out of print, though the books are not especially difficult to find. My copy of this one still carries a check out card from a college library; it was last borrowed twice in 1976, and once in 1985. The author was a very notable literary critic in his day: this book on Melville won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 1951, when the other winners that year were Wallace Stevens for poetry, and William Faulkner for fiction. But his career was effectively ruined when he was publicly outed and arrested for being gay at the turn of the 1960s. For a while, he was institutionalised. He didn’t write much after that.

Not being especially well acquainted with the state of writing on Melville, I have no idea how this book is currently regarded; but it is better written than a great deal of literary criticism, and it remains a readable and engaging introduction to this author’s life and works. It provides a condensed biography alongside an assessment of all his major works, plus some of his stories.

(Regular followers of this blog might be sensing a theme here. I’ve been reading a lot of Melville lately, and a lot about him. I’ve read 'Moby-Dick' a couple of times, and lately I’ve been reading his stories. I feel embarrassed to admit that I’ve always felt an affinity for his work — he’s not emblematic of much that’s admirable these days — but until recently I never knew much about his life. I didn’t know that the novel for which he is best known today effectively marked the end of his career as a respected writer in his own time. I didn’t know that at a certain point in his life he effectively stopped writing for publication altogether, and got a real job; I didn’t know that he spent almost 20 years treading the wharves in New York as a customs inspector, or that by all accounts he was entirely incorruptible in his final role. I didn’t know that his work was almost forgotten after his death until it was revived in the twentieth century by writers with an entirely different experience of the world than he might have shared. Perhaps none of this matters, though.)

Arvin’s book covers a lot of ground in a breezy fashion, and it’s written in a style that leans heavily on its own authority. The bibliography is brief, and there’s a near total absence of ‘theory’. Years are spanned in vague asides. The whole thing is richly speculative. Were this an undergraduate essay, the reliance on disclaimers like ‘We can never know for sure, but…’ and ‘We cannot say for certain, but…’ would see dozens of red lines through the text.

Nobody writes like this anymore. Opinionated, conversational, vaguely irresponsible with regard to the truth, and sometimes downright offensive. Arvin is particularly hard on Melville’s wife, and the women writers who sometimes attended the salons with him in his younger years. I had to wince when he describes ‘the mincing marivaudage of conversation at Miss Anne Lynch’s, where he sometimes turned up at this period’.

A certain acknowledgment of domestic discomfort is the closest he comes to the problem of reconciling Melville’s home life with the dream life of his writing. We know today various things about this: that he was at the very least unpleasant to be around; probably he was violent towards his wife. It might be accurate to say that Arvin is happy to leave these things unreconciled. Encountered today, this becomes the book’s most difficult suggestion: the idea that a great writer must inevitably have an unstable, unhappy home life, as if whatever he did was only one unpolished facet of the life of a genius.

But in most cases Arvin convinces through the sheer bravura of his rhetoric. Reading this is like watching a performance by a great lecturer who is sometimes carried away by the force of his own argument; you can’t always follow him, but it’s always a pleasure to watch from a distance. It’s possible to let the book fall open at any page and find something that catches your eye and leads you off down some long, strange train of thought:

‘To speak of the structure and texture of Moby Dick is to embark upon a series of paradoxes that are soberly truthful and precise. Few books of its dimensions have owed so much to books that have preceded them, and few have owed so little; not many imaginative works have so strong and strict a unity, and not many are composed of such various and even discordant materials; few great novels have been comparably concrete, factual, and prosaic, and few of course have been so large and comprehensive in their generality, so poetic both in their surface fabric and central nature…Such a book could only have been written by an American, and an American of Melville’s generation, working as he did in a kind of isolation from the central current of European writing in his time — an isolation quite consistent with his keeping abreast of it intellectually — and, while losing something in consequence, gaining something indispensable he could not otherwise have had.’

Writing like this is brilliant and sometimes frustrating. It rolls out like a river, or like a big American car: big and smooth and comfortable. It feels authoritative and confident to a confounding degree. But it perfectly encapsulates, even replicates, that sense of constant flux that we find in Melville’s own writing. It is the same inconsistency, the same maddening inscrutability. I want to quibble — I want to underline phrases like ‘soberly truthful and precise’ and call upon the author to explain exactly what he means by this. But at the same time, what is there to disagree with here?

[Esteban del Mal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Arvin likes the word prosaic.

[Tony Gualtieri · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sympathetic, but not uncritical, biography of Melville's literary career. Arvin is too harsh on the shortcomings of Pierre and The Confidence-Man, but he is excellent on Moby Dick, and he makes an strong case for the importance of Clarel.

Arvin has an uncanny ability to inhabit Melville's mind, with all its profundities and contradictions. He demonstrates that the underlying theme of all of Melville's work is the conflict between good and evil, innocence and experience. He backs up his observations with details from the books and from Melville's life. He hints at Melville's conflicted sexuality but does not dwell on it. The portrait emerges of the writer as a man uncomfortable in bourgeois society, whose best writing was set in exotic locations well away from the company of women.

This is an older book, and it shows in the ornate prose and psychological assumptions. It's the best thing I've read on Melville, and it's made me add the epic Clarel to my reading list.

[Roy · Rating 2 out of 5]

A biography and literary analysis: very old school (1950) literary criticism. The author employs both Freudian criticism and close readings of texts in an attempt to penetrate Melville's intent. On the whole, I found the effort to be forced. It is clear that Arvin finds Melville's lack of belief a Calvinist God to be a problem.
However, the chapter on Moby Dick was worth reading. It contained interesting tidbits. If you are after a biography of Melville, there are newer ones, e.g., Hershel Parker Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, 2 Vols. (1996, 2002).
I read Arvin's book only because C.L.R. James recommended it in his book on Melville: Mariners, Renegades and Castaways... (1953). At the time it would have been the most up-to-date biography.
Read Arvin's book if you want a taste of mid-twentieth century literary criticism.

[Lenore · Rating 4 out of 5]

i'm only about 50 pages into this, but i'm surprised it has an average of only three three stars. so far, i love it: the prose style, the organization, and, of course, the subject matter.