Herman Melville

• 1. Introduction

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  Herman Melville died on the morning of the 28th of September 1891, and the death notice in The New York Times misspelled his great novel as "Mobie Dick." That small error would later be read as proof he had been forgotten. By 1876, every book Melville had ever written was out of print. He had spent his last working years as a customs inspector for New York City, a job he held for 19 years. Over his entire lifetime, his writing earned him just over $10,000. How does a man who jumped ship in the South Pacific and wrote one of the Great American Novels die almost unknown to the public? What did he see at sea that he could never write his way out of? And why did a single unfinished manuscript, stored for decades in a family breadbox, change everything in 1919?

• 2. Double Revolutionary Descent

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  Herman Melville was born in New York City on the 1st of August 1819, the third of eight children of Allan Melvill and Maria Gansevoort Melvill. He later expressed satisfaction in what he called his "double revolutionary descent." His paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melvill, took part in the Boston Tea Party. His maternal grandfather, General Peter Gansevoort, commanded the defense of Fort Stanwix in New York in 1777.

  Allan Melvill traveled regularly to Europe as a commission merchant and importer of French dry goods. He had spent two years in Paris as a young man and learned to speak French fluently. In 1814 he married Maria Gansevoort, who held to her family's strict Dutch Reformed version of the Calvinist creed. The Gansevoorts spoke Dutch at home, and Maria knew the Bible in both English and Dutch. Almost three weeks after his birth, Herman was baptized at home by a minister of the South Reformed Dutch Church.

  During the 1820s the family lived a privileged life, supported by three or more servants at a time, moving every four years to more elegant quarters. But Allan lived beyond his means on borrowed money. By 1830 he owed the Melvill and Gansevoort families a sum exceeding $20,000. Biographer Newton Arvin argued that the comfort of Melville's early childhood depended less on this spending than on a tender spirit in the family, describing Allan as "a man of real sensibility and a particularly warm and loving father."

• 3. A Father's Collapse

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  In December 1831, Allan Melvill returned from New York City by steamboat, then traveled the last 70 miles in an open carriage over two days and two nights in subfreezing temperatures. By early January he showed signs of delirium. He grew worse until his wife felt his suffering had deprived him of his intellect. On the 28th of January 1832, he died, two months before his 50th birthday. Since Herman was no longer attending school, he likely witnessed his father's deterioration. Twenty years later, Melville described a similar death in Pierre.

  The collapse had begun before the death. Allan had not sent his own son Allan to college, choosing France instead, and the family's finances unraveled fast. When Melville's paternal grandfather died on the 16th of September 1832, the family discovered Allan had borrowed more than his share of the inheritance. Maria received only $20.

  Uncle Peter Gansevoort, a director of the New York State Bank, got Herman a job as a clerk for $150 a year. Biographers reach for a passage in Redburn to imagine what he felt: "I had learned to think much and bitterly before my time." Arvin spoke of "the tormented psychology, of the decayed patrician." That phrase would shadow Melville for the rest of his life.

• 4. Years At Sea

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  On the 3rd of January 1841, the whaler Acushnet set sail from New Bedford, and Melville was aboard as a green hand, signed on for 1/175th of whatever profits the voyage yielded. Built in 1840, the ship measured some 104 feet in length and slightly less than 360 tons. Melville slept with some twenty others in the forecastle, while Captain Valentine Pease and the skilled men slept aft.

  From July into August of 1841, the Acushnet regularly gammed with the Lima from Nantucket. There Melville met William Henry Chase, son of Owen Chase, who handed him a copy of his father's account of the wreck of the Essex. Ten years later Melville wrote in his own copy: "The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, and close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect upon me." A visit to the Galapagos Islands later became the basis for "The Encantadas."

  In the summer of 1842 the ship reached the Marquesas Islands and anchored at Nuku Hiva. There Melville and his shipmate Richard Tobias Greene, known as Toby, jumped ship. His stay in or near the Taipi Valley became his first book, Typee. He left aboard the Australian whaler Lucy Ann bound for Tahiti, took part in a mutiny, and was briefly jailed in the Calabooza Beretanee. He served on the Nantucket whaler Charles and Henry, then joined the U.S. Navy on the 20th of August 1843 as an ordinary seaman. He reached Boston on the 3rd of October 1844. Biographer Arvin said these wander-years created "a settled hatred of external authority, a lust for personal freedom."

• 5. Overnight Renown

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  Typee was published in February 1846 in London by John Murray, in his travel adventure series, and became an overnight bestseller. Melville's brother Gansevoort had found the publisher. An unsigned review in the Salem Advertiser, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, called it 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."

  Pleased but wary of the adulation, Melville feared he would "go down to posterity... as a 'man who lived among the cannibals'!" The sequel, Omoo, followed in 1847. The two books gave him overnight renown, and he often entertained admirers with his stories. The writer Nathaniel Parker Willis wrote, "With his cigar and his Spanish eyes, he talks Typee and Omoo."

  In June 1847 Melville became engaged to Elizabeth Knapp Shaw, known as Lizzie, daughter of Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice of Massachusetts and a close friend of Melville's late father. They married on the 4th of August 1847. Lizzie once wrote of her new husband stalking into her room "without even the ceremony of knocking, bringing me perhaps a button to sew on, or some equally romantic occupation." Their first child, Malcolm, was born on the 16th of February 1849. The success of these early books gave Melville the financial security he would soon spend chasing a far harder kind of book.

• 6. Hawthorne And The Whale

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  From the 4th to the 12th of August 1850, the Melvilles gathered with Evert Duyckinck, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other literary figures at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, for parties and picnics. Nathaniel Hawthorne joined the group. On one outing, Hawthorne and Melville sought shelter from the rain together and had a deep, private conversation. Melville then read Hawthorne's collection Mosses from an Old Manse and wrote a review calling the stories "shrouded in blackness, ten times black."

  Melville was already at work on his whale. A letter of the 1st of May 1850 told Richard Henry Dana Jr., "I am half way in the work." That summer he borrowed Thomas Carlyle from Duyckinck's library, and Delbanco later described what emerged as "the most ambitious book ever conceived by an American writer." In September 1850 Melville borrowed three thousand dollars from his father-in-law to buy a 160-acre farm he named Arrowhead, after the arrowheads dug up during planting.

  Melville wrote to Hawthorne, "I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul." He dedicated the book to him. The Whale appeared in Britain in three volumes on the 18th of October 1851, and Moby-Dick appeared in the United States on the 14th of November. In between, on the 22nd of October, the Melvilles' son Stanwix was born. Hawthorne told Duyckinck in December, "What a book Melville has written! It gives me an idea of much greater power than his preceding ones."

• 7. Crazy In The Press

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  On the 8th of September 1852, the New York Day Book ran an attack headlined "HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY." Offered as a news story, it reported that his last book, Pierre, "appeared to be composed of the ravings and reveries of a madman," and added that his friends were "taking measures to place him under treatment." Moby-Dick had not found an audience, and critics scorned the heavily psychological Pierre: or, The Ambiguities.

  Melville's finances and health both frayed. He finished an Agatha story, Isle of the Cross, but Harper and Brothers was "prevented" from publishing it because the manuscript was lost. From November 1853 to 1856 he published fourteen tales and sketches in magazines, gathered into The Piazza Tales, including "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno." His father-in-law described his working habits: "When he is deeply engaged in one of his literary works, he confines himself to hard study many hours in the day, with little or no exercise."

  Shaw advanced Melville $1,500 from Lizzie's inheritance to travel in Europe and the Holy Land. In November 1856, at Southport, Melville and Hawthorne smoked cigars among the sand dunes and talked. Hawthorne wrote in his journal that Melville "informed me that he 'pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated,'" yet had "a very high and noble nature." On the 1st of April 1857 Melville published his last full-length novel, The Confidence-Man. The Holy Land would feed a far longer work to come.

• 8. The Customs Inspector Poet

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  In 1866 Melville became a customs inspector for New York City, a post he held for 19 years with a reputation for honesty in a notoriously corrupt institution. Unknown to him, his position was sometimes protected by Chester A. Arthur, then a customs official who admired his writing but never spoke to him. That same year he published Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, 72 poems reflecting on the American Civil War. Of a print run of 1,260 copies, 300 went out as review copies and 551 were sold.

  Grief tracked these years. In 1867 the Melvilles' older son Malcolm died at home at age 18 from a self-inflicted gunshot. In May 1867 Lizzie's brother Sam tried to arrange for her to leave Melville and tell a court he was insane, but Lizzie refused to go along. Robertson-Lorant wrote that Melville could behave like the "tyrannical captains he had portrayed in his novels."

  Melville spent years on Clarel: A Poem and a Pilgrimage, an 18,000-line epic inspired by his 1856 trip to the Holy Land, among the longest single poems in American literature. Its character Rolfe resembles the younger Melville, while the reclusive Vine is loosely based on Hawthorne. Publication of 350 copies was funded by a bequest from his uncle in 1876, but sales failed and the unsold copies were burned. The critic Lewis Mumford found an unread copy in the New York Public Library in 1925, "with its pages uncut."

  At his death, Melville left an unfinished novella titled Billy Budd, its pages in disarray after revisions made in several stages. Lizzie could not decide her husband's intentions, or even read his handwriting in places, and gave up on editing it. The pages were stored in a family breadbox until 1919, when Melville's granddaughter gave them to Raymond Weaver. Weaver at first dismissed the work's importance, then published a quick transcription in 1924 that contained many misreadings.

  The centennial of Melville's birth in 1919 coincided with what became known as the "Melville revival." The renewed interest had begun in 1917 with Carl Van Doren's article on Melville in a standard history of American literature. Van Doren encouraged Weaver, whose Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic appeared in 1921, the author's first full-length biography. D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature followed in 1923, and Lewis Mumford's biography in 1929.

  Billy Budd became an immediate critical success in England, then in the United States. It was adapted as a Broadway stage play in 1951, then an opera, and in 1961 as a film. In 1962 scholars Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts published a critical reading text that was widely accepted. The novel the press once called "Mobie Dick" would eventually be considered one of the Great American Novels, written by a man who said he wanted only "the belated funeral flower of fame."