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Herman Melville

Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a prosperous merchant whose death in 1832 left the family in dire financial straits. He took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a merchant ship and then on the whaler Acushnet, but he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands. Typee, his first book, and its sequel, Omoo (1847), were travel-adventures based on his encounters with the peoples of the island. Their success gave him the financial security to marry Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of the Boston jurist Lemuel Shaw. Mardi (1849), a romance-adventure and his first book not based on his own experience, was not well received. Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), both tales based on his experience as a well-born young man at sea, were given respectable reviews, but did not sell well enough to support his expanding family.

Melville's growing literary ambition showed in Moby-Dick (1851), which took nearly a year and a half to write, but it did not find an audience, and critics scorned his psychological novel Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852). From 1853 to 1856, Melville published short fiction in magazines, including "Benito Cereno" and "Bartleby, the Scrivener". In 1857, he traveled to England, toured the Near East, and published his last work of prose, The Confidence-Man (1857). He moved to New York in 1863, eventually taking a position as United States customs inspector.

From that point, Melville focused his creative powers on poetry. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) was his poetic reflection on the moral questions of the American Civil War. In 1867, his eldest child Malcolm died at home from a self-inflicted gunshot. Melville's metaphysical epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land was published in 1876. In 1886, his other son Stanwix died of apparent tuberculosis, and Melville retired. During his last years, he privately published two volumes of poetry, and left one volume unpublished. The novella Billy Budd was left unfinished at his death, but was published posthumously in 1924. Melville died from cardiovascular disease in 1891.

Herman Melville's schooling began when he was five and was interrupted at age 12 by the death of his father. Around the time the Melvills moved to a newly built house at 33 Bleecker Street in Manhattan in 1824, Herman and his older brother Gansevoort were sent to the New York Male High School.[16] In 1826, the year that Herman contracted scarlet fever, Allan Melvill described him as "very backwards in speech & somewhat slow in comprehension" at first,[17][18] but his development increased its pace and Allan was surprised "that Herman proved the best Speaker in the introductory Department".[17][19] In 1829, both Gansevoort and Herman were transferred to Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School, and Herman enrolled in the English Department on September 28.[17] "Herman I think is making more progress than formerly," Allan wrote in May 1830 to Major Melvill, "and without being a bright Scholar, he maintains a respectable standing, and would proceed further, if he could only be induced to study more—being a most amiable and innocent child, I cannot find it in my heart to coerce him".

Emotionally unstable and behind on paying the rent for the house on Broadway, Herman's father tried to recover by moving his family to Albany, New York, in 1830 and going into the fur business.[21] Herman attended the Albany Academy from October 1830 to October 1831, where he took the standard preparatory course, studying reading and spelling; penmanship; arithmetic; English grammar; geography; natural history; universal, Greek, Roman and English history; classical biography; and Jewish antiquities. In early August 1831, Herman marched in the Albany city government procession of the year's "finest scholars" and was presented with a copy of The London Carcanet, a collection of poems and prose, inscribed to him as "first best in ciphering books". As Melville scholar Merton Sealts observed,

The ubiquitous classical references in Melville's published writings suggest that his study of ancient history, biography, and literature during his school days left a lasting impression on both his thought and his art, as did his almost encyclopedic knowledge of both the Old and the New Testaments.

Nonetheless, Melville's time at the Academy was soon interrupted. Parker speculates he left it in October 1831 because "even the tiny tuition fee seemed too much to pay".

In December, Allan Melvill returned from New York City by steamboat, but had to travel the last seventy miles in an open carriage for two days and two nights at sub-freezing temperatures.[26] In early January, he began to show "signs of delirium",[27] and his situation grew worse until his wife felt his suffering deprived him of his intellect.[28] He died on January 28, 1832, two months before reaching fifty.[29] As Herman was no longer attending school, he likely witnessed these scenes.[29] Twenty years later he described a similar death in Pierre.

Work as a clerk

The death of Allan caused many major shifts in the family's material and spiritual circumstances. One result was the greater influence of his mother's religious beliefs. Maria sought consolation in her faith and in April was admitted as a member of the First Reformed Dutch Church. Herman's saturation in orthodox Calvinism was surely the most decisive intellectual and spiritual influence of his early life.[31] Two months after his father's death, Gansevoort entered the cap and fur business. Uncle Peter Gansevoort, a director of the New York State Bank, got Herman a job as clerk for $150 a year (equivalent to $4,100 in 2021).[32] Biographers cite a passage from Redburn[12][32] when trying to answer what Herman must have felt then: "I had learned to think much and bitterly before my time," the narrator remarks, adding, "I must not think of those delightful days, before my father became a bankrupt ... and we removed from the city; for when I think of those days, something rises up in my throat and almost strangles me". With Melville, Arvin argues, one has to reckon with "psychology, the tormented psychology, of the decayed patrician".

When Melville's paternal grandfather died on September 16, 1832, Maria and her children discovered Allan, somewhat unscrupulously, had borrowed more than his share of his inheritance, meaning Maria received only $20 (equivalent to $500 in 2021).[34] His paternal grandmother died almost exactly seven months later.[35] Melville did his job well at the bank; although he was only 14 in 1834, the bank considered him competent enough to be sent to Schenectady, New York on an errand. Not much else is known from this period except that he was very fond of drawing.[36] The visual arts became a lifelong interest.[37] Around May 1834, the Melvilles moved to another house in Albany, a three-story brick house. That same month a fire destroyed Gansevoort's skin-preparing factory, which left him with personnel he could neither employ nor afford. Instead he pulled Melville out of the bank to man the cap and fur store.

Intermittent work and studies

In 1835, while still working in the store, Melville enrolled in Albany Classical School, perhaps using Maria's part of the proceeds from the sale of the estate of his maternal grandmother in March 1835.[38] In September of the following year, Herman was back in Albany Academy in the Latin course. He also participated in debating societies, in an apparent effort to make up as much as he could for his missed years of schooling. In this period he read Shakespeare—at least Macbeth, whose witch scenes gave him the chance to teasingly scare his sisters.[39] By March 1837, he was again withdrawn from Albany Academy.

Gansevoort served as a role model and support for Melville throughout his life, particularly during this time trying to cobble together an education. In early 1834 Gansevoort had become a member of Albany's Young Men's Association for Mutual Improvement, and in January 1835 Melville joined him there.[40] Gansevoort also had copies of John Todd's Index Rerum, a blank register for indexing remarkable passages from books one had read for easy retrieval. Among the sample entries which Gansevoort made showing his academic scrupulousness was "Pequot, beautiful description of the war with," with a short title reference to the place in Benjamin Trumbull's A Complete History of Connecticut (Volume I in 1797, and Volume II in 1818) where the description could be found. The two surviving volumes of Gansevoort's are the best evidence for Melville's reading in this period. Gansevoort's entries include books Melville used for Moby-Dick and Clarel, such as "Parsees—of India—an excellent description of their character, and religion and an account of their descent—East India Sketch Book p. 21".[41] Other entries are on Panther, the pirate's cabin, and storm at sea from James Fenimore Cooper's The Red Rover, Saint-Saba.

Work as a school teacher

The Panic of 1837 forced Gansevoort to file for bankruptcy in April. In June, Maria told the younger children they needed to leave Albany for somewhere cheaper. Gansevoort began studying law in New York City while Herman managed the farm before getting a teaching position at Sikes District School near Lenox, Massachusetts. He taught about 30 students of various ages, including some his own age.

The semester over, he returned to his mother in 1838. In February he was elected president of the Philo Logos Society, which Peter Gansevoort invited to move into Stanwix Hall for no rent. In the Albany Microscope in March, Melville published two polemical letters about issues in vogue in the debating societies. Historians Leon Howard and Hershel Parker suggest the motive behind the letters was a youthful desire to have his rhetorical skills publicly recognized.[44] In May, the Melvilles moved to a rented house in Lansingburgh, almost 12 miles north of Albany.[45] Nothing is known about what Melville did or where he went for several months after he finished teaching at Sikes.[46] On November 12, five days after arriving in Lansingburgh, Melville paid for a term at Lansingburgh Academy to study surveying and engineering. In an April 1839 letter recommending Herman for a job in the Engineer Department of the Erie Canal, Peter Gansevoort says his nephew "possesses the ambition to make himself useful in a business which he desires to make his profession," but no job resulted.

Just weeks after this failure, Melville's first known published essay appeared. Using the initials "L.A.V.", Herman contributed "Fragments from a Writing Desk" to the weekly newspaper Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser, which printed it in two installments, the first on May 4.[48] According to Merton Sealts, his use of heavy-handed allusions reveals familiarity with the work of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Walter Scott, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Thomas Moore.[49] Parker calls the piece "characteristic Melvillean mood-stuff" and considers its style "excessive enough [...] to indulge his extravagances and just enough overdone to allow him to deny that he was taking his style seriously".[48] For Delbanco, the style is "overheated in the manner of Poe, with sexually charged echoes of Byron and The Arabian Nights".

Upon his return, Melville regaled his family and friends with his adventurous tales and romantic experiences, and they urged him to put them into writing. Melville completed Typee, his first book, in the summer of 1845 while living in Troy, New York. His brother Gansevoort found a publisher for it in London, where it was published in February 1846 by John Murray in his travel adventure series. It became an overnight bestseller in England, then in New York, when it was published on March 17 by Wiley & Putnam.

In the narrative, Melville likely extended the period of time he had spent on the island and also incorporated material from source books he had assembled.[73] Milder calls Typee "an appealing mixture of adventure, anecdote, ethnography, and social criticism presented with a genial latitudinarianism that gave novelty to a South Sea idyll at once erotically suggestive and romantically chaste".

An unsigned review in the Salem Advertiser written by Nathaniel Hawthorne called the book a "skilfully managed" narrative by an author with "that freedom of view ... which renders him tolerant of codes of morals that may be little in accordance with our own". Hawthorne continued:

This book is lightly but vigorously written; and we are acquainted with no work that gives a freer and more effective picture of barbarian life, in that unadulterated state of which there are now so few specimens remaining. The gentleness of disposition that seems akin to the delicious climate, is shown in contrast with the traits of savage fierceness...He has that freedom of view—it would be too harsh to call it laxity of principle—which renders him tolerant of codes of morals that may be little in accordance with our own, a spirit proper enough to a young and adventurous sailor, and which makes his book the more wholesome to our staid landsmen.

Pleased but not overwhelmed by the adulation of his new public, Melville later expressed concern that he would "go down to posterity ... as a 'man who lived among the cannibals'!"[75] The writing of Typee brought Melville back into contact with his friend Greene—Toby in the book—who wrote confirming Melville's account in newspapers. The two corresponded until 1863, and in his final years Melville "traced and successfully located his old friend" for a further meeting of the two.[76] In March 1847, Omoo, a sequel to Typee, was published by Murray in London, and in May by Harper in New York.[69] Omoo is "a slighter but more professional book," according to Milder.[77] Typee and Omoo gave Melville overnight renown as a writer and adventurer, and he often entertained by telling stories to his admirers. As the writer and editor Nathaniel Parker Willis wrote, "With his cigar and his Spanish eyes, he talks Typee and Omoo, just as you find the flow of his delightful mind on paper".[78] In 1847 Melville tried unsuccessfully to find a "government job" in Washington.

In June 1847, Melville and Elizabeth "Lizzie" Knapp Shaw were engaged, after knowing each other for approximately three months. Melville had first asked her father, Lemuel Shaw, for her hand in March, but was turned down at the time.[79] Shaw, Chief Justice of Massachusetts, had been a close friend of Melville's father, and his marriage with Melville's aunt Nancy was prevented only by her death. His warmth and financial support for the family continued after Allan's death. Melville dedicated his first book, Typee, to him.[80] Lizzie was raised by her grandmother and an Irish nurse.[81] Arvin suggests that Melville's interest in Lizzie may have been stimulated by "his need of Judge Shaw's paternal presence".[80] They were married on August 4, 1847.[69] Lizzie described their marriage as "very unexpected, and scarcely thought of until about two months before it actually took place".[82] She wanted to be married in church, but they had a private wedding ceremony at home to avoid possible crowds hoping to see the celebrity.[83] The couple honeymooned in the then-British Province of Canada, and traveled to Montreal. They settled in a house on Fourth Avenue in New York City (now called Park Avenue).

According to scholars Joyce Deveau Kennedy and Frederick James Kennedy, Lizzie brought to their marriage a sense of religious obligation, an intent to make a home with Melville regardless of place, a willingness to please her husband by performing such "tasks of drudgery" as mending stockings, an ability to hide her agitation, and a desire "to shield Melville from unpleasantness".[84] The Kennedys conclude their assessment with:

If the ensuing years did bring regrets to Melville's life, it is impossible to believe he would have regretted marrying Elizabeth. In fact, he must have realized that he could not have borne the weight of those years unaided—that without her loyalty, intelligence, and affection, his own wild imagination would have had no "port or haven".

Biographer Robertson-Lorant cites "Lizzie's adventurous spirit and abundant energy," and she suggests that "her pluck and good humor might have been what attracted Melville to her, and vice versa".[85] An example of such good humor appears in a letter about her not yet used to being married: "It seems sometimes exactly as if I were here for a visit. The illusion is quite dispelled however when Herman stalks into my room without even the ceremony of knocking, bringing me perhaps a button to sew on, or some equally romantic occupation".[86] On February 16, 1849, the Melvilles' first child, Malcolm, was born.

In March 1848, Mardi was published by Richard Bentley in London, and in April by Harper in New York.[69] Nathaniel Hawthorne thought it a rich book "with depths here and there that compel a man to swim for his life".[88] According to Milder, the book began as another South Sea story but, as he wrote, Melville left that genre behind, first in favor of "a romance of the narrator Taji and the lost maiden Yillah," and then "to an allegorical voyage of the philosopher Babbalanja and his companions through the imaginary archipelago of Mardi".

In October 1849, Redburn was published by Bentley in London, and in November by Harper in New York.[69] The bankruptcy and death of Allan Melvill, and Melville's own youthful humiliations surface in this "story of outward adaptation and inner impairment".[89] Biographer Robertson-Lorant regards the work as a deliberate attempt for popular appeal: "Melville modeled each episode almost systematically on every genre that was popular with some group of antebellum readers," combining elements of "the picaresque novel, the travelogue, the nautical adventure, the sentimental novel, the sensational French romance, the gothic thriller, temperance tracts, urban reform literature, and the English pastoral".[90] His next novel, White-Jacket, was published by Bentley in London in January 1850, and in March by Harper in New York.

Although Melville's own income remained limited, in 1884, Lizzie received a legacy that enabled him to buy a steady stream of books and prints each month.[136] Melville retired on December 31, 1885,[126] after several of his wife's relatives further supported the couple with supplementary legacies and inheritances. On February 22, 1886, Stanwix, their younger son, died in San Francisco at age 36, from tuberculosis.In 1889, Melville became a member of the New York Society Library,

Melville had a modest revival of popularity in England when readers rediscovered his novels. He published two collections of poems inspired by his early experiences at sea, with prose head notes. Intended for his relatives and friends, each had a print run of 25 copies. The first, John Marr and Other Sailors, was published in 1888, followed by Timoleon in 1891.

He died the morning of September 28, 1891. His death certificate shows "cardiac dilation" as the cause.[138] He was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City.[139] There were few obituaries.

New York Times obituary notice, September 29, 1891, which misspelled Melville's masterpiece as Mobie Dick

The New York Times's initial death notice called his masterpiece "Mobie Dick", which later was erroneously taken to mean that he was unappreciated at his time of death.[140][141] But there were some appreciations. The Times, for instance, published a substantial article of appreciation on October 2. The author said that thinking back to Melville's books that were so much read forty years earlier, there is "no difficulty determining why they were then read and talked about," but the difficulty is "to discover why they are read and talked about no longer."

Melville left a volume of poetry, Weeds and Wildings, and a sketch, "Daniel Orme", unpublished at the time of his death. His wife also found pages for an unfinished novella, titled Billy Budd. Melville had revised and rearranged the manuscript in several stages, leaving the pages in disarray. Lizzie could not decide her husband's intentions (or even read his handwriting in some places) and abandoned attempts to edit the manuscript for publication. The pages were stored in a family breadbox until 1919 when Melville's granddaughter gave them to Raymond Weaver. Weaver, who initially dismissed the work's importance, published a quick transcription in 1924. This version, however, contained many misreadings, some of which affected interpretation. It was an immediate critical success in England, then in the United States. In 1962, the Melville scholars Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts published a critical reading text that was widely accepted.[143] It was adapted as a stage play on Broadway in 1951, then an opera, and in 1961 as a film.

COURTESY--WIKIPEDIA
- Herman Melville

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