The Prophetic Melville: Experience, Transcendence, and Tragedy (review)

248Reviews stoical philosopher who is also a romantic reactionary, the monkish mysoginist who is also an inveterate lecher. DeFanti's biography is insightful, detached, objective, yet funny and touching and compassionate. We might wonder why anyone ever put up with Edward Dahlberg, but we also come away from the book realizing that Dahlberg often wondered the same thing. He closed his Confessions: "This is a song of no-knowledge, a chant of shame. What else can a memoire be but an enchiridion of chagrins? I walk upon my hurts which readers entitle my books. Sunset writes for me, and rains scribble my woes. Forgive me, dear unknown readers, for I cannot pardon myself nor life." University of FloridaJohn Cech Sherrill, Rowland A. The Prophetic Melville: Experience, Transcendence , and Tragedy. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1979. 269 pp. Cloth: $17.00. There was fair warning—a gross error on the first page, the assertion that Melville and Hawthorne last met on November 20, 1856. And in simple fact I have never found a book so hard to read as this one. At first I was overwhelmed by banalities portentously expressed and by what I tentatively began to query in the margins as "Blather?" Then I began marking features of style. Sherrill's book is littered with pompous deadwood: "What is less pointed, but no less important, in this letter to Hawthorne is" (p. 109) and "what is important in the consideration here, however, is" (p. 112). Inelegancies abound—such as "the religious thrust at the heart of the book" (p. 88); this awkward echo from p. 7: "in nature, as Ralph Waldo Emerson had put it in Nature"; the statement that Hawthorne was sent "an advanced copy" of Typee (p. 19); and the news that Melville did not desire "to promulgate a career" (p. 85). "In" and "as" occur in such profusion as to tie whole pages in knots (see pp. 94, 96, 206, or 215). From describing someone in the third person, Sherrill shifts violently into quotations in which that person speaks in the first person (pp. 7, 29). Chapter 9 begins with almost the same words as Chapter 8. Usages become formulaic, as in the reassuring "in short," which jars most when used without due regard for context ("In short, the jacket" [p. 78]). Some four dozen instances of the recapitulative "then" lend spurious logicality to paragraphs ("Withal, then, White-Jacket is stunned" [p. 72]). AU too often sentences open formulaically with "Although" or the reassuringly logical "Now" ("Now, the point is not to condemn Tommo" [p. 116]). Gradually I realized that there is something more seriously amiss in Sherrill's book than stylistic infelicity or idiosyncracy. In particular, one recurrent construction (I toted up more than a hundred examples) downright spooked me: the use of an "If clause when doubt was not overtly raised, as on p. 2: "If the origins, forms, and trials of this idea of transcendence occurred in these three distinct, or at least discernible, stages in Melville's fiction, the nature and composition of the fictions themselves, along with some of the other writings, reveal the sources and development in deeply associated stages of Melville's sense of the prophetic requirements of his art in relation to his age." (This quotation can stand as a fair sample of Sherrill's opaque prose.) I knew there was something askew in the compulsive use of an apparently concessive construction which disguised an insistence that what had just been said was in fact true, and to be assumed as true, but being of the generation that was shortchanged on grammar lessons, I could not be sure just what the problem was, and sought help from my colleague William Frawley, a psycho-linguist. Studies in American Fiction249 Frawley's analysis was very helpful; not quite incidentally, it strengthened my conviction that graduate students who are studying "the aesthetic implications of textual and biographical evidence" with me and "stylistics" with Stan Fish had better be studying psycho-linguistics at the same time. Anyhow, Frawley looked at Sherrill's habitual "if structure in two ways, on the prepositional level and on the discourse level. Frawley demonstrated that "potential mood" paraphrases...