Melville and War

147 REVIEWS MELVILLE AND WAR Joyce Sparer Adler, War in Melville's Imagination. New York University Press, 1981. xii+189pp. Herman Melville's contemporaries may have failed to comprehend the range and depth of his art, and many were certainly hostile to what they did understand. But at least both his enemies and his friends recognized the radicalism of his social vision. In the 1840s and 185Os this fierce scourge of imperialism, militarism, racism, organized reUgion, and capitalism seemed a menace to the estabUshed order of American society. As William O. Bourne put it in the New York Daily Tribune of October 2, 1847: "His caricatures of the Missionaries. . .his contempt for constituted authorities and the consuls and officers—his insubordination. . .his choice of low society. . .all entitle him to rank as a man, where his absurdities and misstatements place him as a writer—the shameless herald of his own wantonness, and the pertinacious traducer of loftier and better men." Critics such as George Washington Peck (writing in the American Whig Review of November, 1852) claimed that "he strikes with an impious, though, happily, weak hand, at the very foundations of society" and thundered that it was essential "to turn our critical Aegis upon him, and freeze him into silence." Naval officers frantically wrote to each other, seeking ways to discredit Melville because he was seriously damaging their authority. For example, Commodore (later Admiral) Samuel Francis DuPont, nephew of E. I. du Pont de Nemours, called Melville "an undyed villain [who] has given us through his talents & Ues, the worst stab yet—one that we will reel under, if it do not swamp us," and secretly solicited a fellow naval officer to write a review "holding that feUow up as he should be. If you can't undertake it—I must pay some feUow a hundred dollars who wiU. . . ."' The efforts to "freeze him into silence" succeeded, so that Melville's career as a professional writer was aborted in 1857 and his writings sank into ever deepening obscurity, to be rediscovered only after the First World War and the Depression created a new mass audience for his message. After the Second World War, and during the purges that accompanied the unleashing of the Cold War, new methods were found to conceal the essence of Melville's vision. Now academics whitewashed and sanitized his works, screened them off with hedges of impenetrable complexities, and buried them under layers of formalist and psychoanalytic criticism. Some went so far as to read into his works the very opposite of what he was saying, thus claiming him as a feUow wishy-washy Uberai or even placing him in the camp of the conservatives. But then the Vietnam War created a new breed ofcritics whose radicalism was congenial to Melville's own spirit. These critics have begun to rescue Melville from those who would gut him of everything vital and progressive. Books such as Edward Grejda's The Common Continent ofMen: RacialEquality in the Writings ofHerman Melville and Carolyn Karcher's Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville's America have shown that at the very center of Melville's creative imagination lay his feelings of confraternity with nonwhite peoples and his detestation of both chattel slavery and wage slavery. Now along comes Joyce Adler's War in Melville's Imagination, which shows us something else that is central, and that is also obvious— once it is pointed out to us. Adler's thesis is simple and straightforward: "Melville's passion against war was a great dynamic in his imagination and a main shaping force in his art." She brings to her reading of Melville at least four qualities that reinforce each other in startling and unexpected ways: a deeply felt moral consciousness; a spectacular visual imagination; a fine ear for prose; and an urge to get to the essence of things. Because these qualities are also characteristic of Melville, Adler's book is able to penetrate profoundly into his imagination. Adler's most dazzling insight is Uke a flare that illuminates the entire field of Melville's creations, vividly displaying the continuity between his very first books in the mid 1840s...