Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative by Hershel Parker (review)

Book reviews, like biographies, should never be about the people who write them. However, the book under review metes out extremely harsh treatment to two American Renaissance scholars of wide reputation, Andrew Delbanco and Brenda Wineapple, with regard to whom a brief disclosure feels appropriate. Professor Delbanco was the second reader on my dissertation. Professor Wineapple was the director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography while I was there as a resident fellow. Both of them have been kind to me in my career, and I consider them my friends. I do not believe that those relationships have influenced my commentary on Parker’s book, but the reader is entitled to some candor on this point.

It is likely impossible for anyone to read Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative without experiencing strong feelings. For the person with an independent knowledge of the subjects on which Parker’s massive and erudite volume touches, it is also impossible to read without profoundly mixed emotions, for it is a book that combines the highest standards of scholarship with reckless expressions of pettiness and professional rancor.

Having previously given us the indispensable two-volume Herman Melville: A Biography (Hopkins), Parker now offers still more fascinating material on his inexhaustible subject. The third and final section of his book adds details and side narratives that Parker could not fit into the biography, as well as emendations based on subsequent discoveries. But in Melville Biography he also gives us a great deal of himself. The book is as much a personal memoir as a scholarly addendum to the biographer’s contributions to our knowledge of Melville. It takes us on the long and winding road of Parker’s development as a scholar, more or less beginning with a months-long struggle with tuberculosis at the age of twenty, during which the author read Shakespeare’s plays over and over again: Hamlet ten times; King John, seven. We discover that Parker’s biography of Melville had its genesis long before the author was aware that he was being led toward biography. The process began in the early 1960s, when Parker, only in his mid-to-late twenties, accepted three successive offers from über-scholar Harrison Hayford: first to edit Moby-Dick as Doubloon: Essays and Extracts (1851–1970), next to co-edit the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick, and finally to become Associate General Editor of The Writings of Herman Melville for Northwestern-Newberry. Parker’s approach to scholarship is powerfully grounded in archival research and in, as he puts it, “the fact which stirs the biographer to responsible imagination” (140).

Though Parker decided to write Herman Melville long after he began his association with Hayford, biography as he has practiced it has been a focused, lifelong pursuit, demanding formidable sacrifices of time and treasure. Parker is highly unusual among current biographers in that his whole energies have been devoted to telling the story of a single subject. Even Robert A. Caro, who has given nearly forty years and counting to writing the definitive Lyndon Johnson biography, warmed up with a book on Robert Moses. Parker argues correctly that the ideal biographer “should be omnivorous, omnipresent, immortal, and strong as a horse” (164). He believes as a matter of conscience that excellent scholarship derives only from work, work, and more work. The most gifted literary thinker, Parker maintains, will fail if he or she has not “year after year, soiled his or her own hands in devoted labor in the archives” (5). For Parker, however, digging in the archives is not a soiling at all, but a holy immersion. He writes, with no intended hyperbole, “There is something sacred about the search for something closer to the truth of Melville’s life” (240). Conversely, ignorance or avoidance of the historical record is nothing less than a sin: “disregarding or distorting the history of scholarship is a violation of morality” (300; his emphasis).

The expectations to which Parker holds the scholar are, to say the...