Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 2, 1851-1891 (review)

R E V I E W S a background significance by Wallace and related to the “chapter”to which they apply. Stella’sseries is not a genre or general idea. His setting in “relation” to a specific great literary work of Melville-Moby-Dick-calls forth a Melville expert to dialogue with it for all of our enrichment. So it has happened in this book. Aileen Callahan Boston College Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 2,1851-1891 HERSHEL PARKER Baltimore and London:Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. 997 Pages t last, a real scandal. It turns out that Melville “made an expedient, emotional decision that does not look wholly honest” (210). He had Aarranged to have his tortoise sketches published as a book by Harpers and, after receiving an advance, he was paid again to publish selections of what would become The Encantadas in Putnam’s Magazine. Many have been fishing for a personal scandal for some time, and now this case of double-dipping looks like the greatest -but perhaps only -catch. Indeed, Hershel Parker demonstrates that Melville was impossible to live with -especially when in the midst of creative ferment -and relatives did contemplate that he may have been as crazy as the newspapers declared, and they did make plans for wife Lizzie to flee in 1867. But Parker finds no evidence of Melville physically abusing his wife, despite twentieth-century rumors, although “he ill treated her by borrowing a great sum of inoney in secret and not being able to pay it back” (631),much of that money going to the extravagance of buying books, and he may have been (probably was) psychologically abusive. But even Malcolm’sstrange death the same year does not seem much of a scandal. It followed no arguments, no rage even at the young man staying out too late -although it’s true that the family was aghast at the shame that the label of suicide brought and hastily modified the account. Truly, Melville was pushed to psychological extremes -but that was all. Still, Volume 2 of Parker’s compendious biography does reveal a scandal, although one utterly different, and far more troubling, than what many seem to have been fishing for recently. Melville may have first won fame because of 9 0 L E v I A T H A N R E V I E W S his ability to survive -and spin yarns about -his captivity on Nuku Hiva, but in this volume we come to understand how his life and, consequently, so much of his art, particularly after Moby-Dick, remained a captivity tale -or, rather, many overlapping captivity tales. We get a sense as never before of how much he was a captive of family demands, workaday life, and money woes of suffocating complexity. With so many obligations, cultural pressures, and debts, it seems a wonder he was able to write at all: his mother’s conservative religious orthodoxy, the smug complacency of his wife’s upper-class Unitarianism, and the weary years walking the docks as customs inspector are just a few examples. Lizzie seemed just as difficult to live with, in her own conventional way, and she joined the rest of the family who, with notable exceptions, recoiled at his literary ambitions once initial fame turned to derision. She would change her mind late in life, but only after others sanctioned the opinion. He did seem to browbeat his wife and daughters into helping him prepare and proofread manuscripts. Yet the whole fascination with discovering his flaws -which are actually fairly obvious is questionable. Herman has his humanities. More importantly, Parker documents the tensions of Melville’s experiences and consciousness, as fallen patrician, sailor, genius, cultural relativist, failed farmer, middle-class office seeker. In particular, we come to understand the development of his intellect, the intense literary and intellectual “to-andfro ” between belief and unbelief, as Hawthorne recorded of their conversation in Liverpool. In that context, the milieu of respectability which held him captive only makes the interior oscillations even more astonishing and poignant. We also get a sense of how much Melville was a captive of his own incredible bad luck and self-defeating...