“Ifs Eternally:”: Melville, Hawthorne, and American Literature

"Ifs Eternally:" Melville, Hawthorne, and American Literature DAVID KETTERER Edwin Haviland Miller. Melville. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1975. 382pp. Richard H. Brodhead. Hawthorne, Melville, and theNovel. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976. 216 pp. Warrick Wadlington. The Confidence Game in American Literature. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 1975. 331 pp. Towards the conclusion of Moby-Dick, Ishmael observes, "There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: - through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally." At summation al points in their very different discussions of Melville the authors of the three books under review each quote this passage (Brodhead, p. 150; Miller, pp. 192-93; Wadlington, pp. 78-79). In each case the quotation is shown to be particularly apposite to the author's developing argument. Clearly Melville's statement is as applicable to the knowledge provided by literary criticism as to any other kind. And, of course, in treating material gone over repeatedly by previous investigators, Brodhead, Miller and Wadlington might be said to "trace the round again." At the same time, taken together in the following order, Miller's psychological portrait of Melville, Brodhead's formalistic study of Hawthorne and Melville, and Wadlington's largely rhetorical analysis of Melville, Twain and Nathanael West appear to trace the cycle from a more or less closed certainty to a creative sense of "Ifs eternally." Adapting a phrase from Billy Budd, Miller describes his biography as an '"inside' narrative" (p. 16). However, the biographer of Melville who wishes to go beyond a mere rehearsal of the chronological facts has scant evidence to build on. Melville did not keep a personal diary and left less than three hundred letters. With the exception of the emotional letters to Hawthorne written in 1850 and 1851, the bulk of this material is singularly unrevealing. Consequently, like other biographers before him, Miller fleshes out the chronological story by drawing THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. VII, NO. 2, FALL 1976 heavily on both the stories Melville wrote and Freud's generalized stories of familylife. The designation," A Biography," on the dust jacket of Miller's book mightbe more informatively expanded to read" A Critical Psychobiography ." Somethinglike seventy per cent of the text is devoted to unbashedly psychologicalinterpretations of Melville's writings. Fortunately, there is no question that Melville did pour much of his personal experience and anguish into his books - his early adventures at sea in Typee, Omoo, Redburn and White-Jacket, something of his inner torments in Pierre,his tripto the Holy Land in search of faith in Clarel.The approach to Melville through his works would be productive even if it were not inevitable. Over and over again, as has been often observed, Melville focuses on one male's relationship withanother: Tommo and Toby, Tommo and Long Ghost, Redburn and Harry Bolton,White-Jacket and Jack Chase, Ishmael and Queequeg, Clarel and Vine, Billyand Captain Vere, Billy and Claggart. It is here, Miller believes, that the inner pattern of Melville's life is to be discerned. That the friendship generally involves a younger and an older man points, according to Miller, to the psychological theme that announces itself in "Fragments from a Writing Desk" theabsence in Melville's own biography of an ideal father-son relationship and thesearch for such a relationship. The biblical analogies in the fiction are applied by Miller directly to Melville (therejected Ishmael), his parents (Abraham, the distant father, and a composite Sarah/Hagar, the alternatively emasculating and loving mother), and his brother (Isaac).Melville's father died in 1832; thus was Ishmael abandoned by Abraham atage twelve. White-Jacket has kept note of a particular day of the year since he was twelve. Other Melville characters, including Ahab, Pierre and Hautboy, experience tragic losses at either twelve years or twelve months. What Miller presents, then, is a "wound'' and "bow" account of Melville...