Tolerable Entertainment: Herman Melville and Professionalism in Antebellum New York (review)

R E V I E W JOHN EVELEV Tolerable Entertainment: Herman Melville and Professionalism in Antebellum New York Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006. xii + 232 pp. I n Tolerable Entertainment, John Evelev runs the calculated, complicated risk of reading Herman Melville as a “window” opening onto the emergent and transformative world of middle-class professional ideology in antebellum New York. This is a risk because Evelev and his readers are challenged to keep Melville, professionalism, and New York all in sight at once. But Evelev expertly helps us meet this challenge, and the result of his risk-taking is an important new book. Tolerable Entertainment is always challenging, smart, and inventive, and the fact that from cover to cover the author’s professional prose remains jargon-free makes it an accessible read. It will undoubtedly add significantly to our understanding of Melville’s work and social surroundings. Evelev would flip the priorities of older, more Melville-centered studies. In his preface he writes that where earlier critics (from Perry Miller to Wyn Kelley) have traced the influence of the city on Melville, holding the author as a sort of discursive center, he will “reverse the process and look at Melville’s literary career and community to understand larger trends within the social and cultural life of antebellum America” (1). This reversal may chill readers still mourning even this subtle a death of the author, still insisting on the authorial self as magnetic center for critical meaning, but the move of course positions Evelev in good current company, as he often recognizes by pointing to the complex critical lineage of “historically oriented criticism of antebellum literature,” which he marks as beginning with Michael Gilmore’s American Romanticism and the Marketplace. Where an older strain of strong criticism privileges the writing self as embedded in and influenced by an historical surrounding, Evelev would look with and through Melville to social history. But this may be a false problem, as adept scholarship holding Melville at the center (e.g. Kelley’s Melville’s City) as well as seemingly re-visionary work like Evelev’s book, admit equally well a responsibility to treat fully both ends of that critical monkey-rope tethering writer to world, world to writer. I think Evelev’s un-professed risk is to pick Melville as his window onto antebellum complexity when the biographical record is already less than robust: one could render Melville transparent, or a caricature; one could de-center a body that is already somewhat liminal. But 60 L E V I A T H A N R E V I E W in the end Evelev presses just as hard on Melville’s biographical matter as the archive will sustain, and we end up with no doubly faint trace of Melville, but rather with the sense of a perfect fit between archive and argument. Evelev argues that “vocational standards and distinctions were central to Melville’s literary career,” and he “examine[s] how [Melville’s] writing reveal[s] issues of the new middle-class vocational model” (ix). This “new vocational model,” the crux of both promise and anxiety for a rising, anxious, antebellum professional middle class, is characterized by “a meritocratic ethos of competitive specialization and expertise that rejected the older professional ethos of elite patronage” (ix). There is a potential problem here too, in that Evelev’s argument works only if the biographical Melville can be understood to have rejected or fallen outside the world-alienating force of this older professional ethos, and this is not immediately apparent. After all, might we not read Melville as “waifed” by complex patronage systems? Wasn’t he something of a “fast fish” when it came to questions of class affiliation? Doesn’t Melville’s intersection with real patronage (e.g. Shaw, Hawthorne, and Duyckinck) as well as imagined patronage (e.g. Melville’s sense of having descended from revolutionary aristocracy) unsettle Evelev’s claim that his authorial practice might meaningfully mesh with “widespread concerns among new middle-class workers”? (ix). In his first chapter, Evelev tackles this implicit counterclaim, skillfully enfolding biography in service to his larger argument. In “Typee and Melville’s Initiation into the...