Product Description

If Dickens was nineteenth-century London personified, Herman Melville was the quintessential American. With a historian’s perspective and a critic’s insight, award-winning author Andrew Delbanco marvelously demonstrates that Melville was very much a man of his era and that he recorded — in his books, letters, and marginalia; and in conversations with friends like Nathaniel Hawthorne and with his literary cronies in Manhattan — an incomparable chapter of American history. From the bawdy storytelling of Typee to the spiritual preoccupations building up to and beyond Moby Dick, Delbanco brilliantly illuminates Melville’s life and work, and his crucial role as a man of American letters.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #264739 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-12
• Released on: 2006-09-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 415 pages

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• ISBN13: 9780375702976
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
As Melville said of Bartleby the Scrivener, "no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man." So, notes Columbia humanities professor Delbanco (The Death of Satan), a similarly incomplete record exists for Melville. Nevertheless, in this accessible account, Delbanco both places the great novelist assuredly in his time and delves into his works' continuing significance. While Melville's career at sea initially defined his literary reputation, Delbanco also notes that an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to go west and his later return to New York City were essential to Melville's sense of the fresh, and fragile, American republic. Delbanco also traces a Romantic thread in Melville's work (he had a fascination with Frankenstein) and the impact of abolitionism, drawing a parallel between the fugitive slave cases judged by Melville's father-in-law and his portrayal of the Pequod's African-American cabin boy, Pip. Melville's gradual withdrawal from public life after Moby-Dick's failed reception added to the dearth of biographic data, but Delbanco saves most of his theorizing for Melville's work—expansively open as it is to Freudian, environmental, postcolonial and endless other interpretations. Even now, Delbanco observes, Melville's uniquely American myth of Ahab and the white whale has been recognized in President Bush's pursuit of Osama bin Laden. 57 b&w illus. (Sept. 23)
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From The New Yorker
Delbanco, a professor of American studies at Columbia, attempts to place Herman Melville and his work in the context of his time-no easy task, since Melville, after the early success of his South Seas adventures "Typee" and "Omoo," was regarded by most of his contemporaries as a freakish failure. "Moby-Dick" was widely panned, and a review of his next novel, "Pierre," was headlined "HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY." His own publishers suspected that he was going mad, and "Billy Budd" remained unpublished for thirty-three years after his death. Delbanco writes about Melville with a sympathy and passion that illuminate both his sad life and the more obscure corners of his writings. "Benito Cereno" gives perspective on the war on terror; and the much maligned "Pierre" is a "preview of the camp sensibility." Melville's very "dissonance in his own time," Delbanco writes, makes him seem at home in ours.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

From The Washington Post
The life and afterlife of Herman Melville (1819-1891) present the greatest illustration in American literature, perhaps in world literature, of the Psalm "The same stone which the builders refused is become the head-stone." After the popular success of Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), which led to the young Melville being dubbed "the man who lived among cannibals," he embarked on a literary career that went gradually, then precipitously, downhill. By the time he was 40 he had essentially abandoned fiction altogether, tried publishing poetry with comparable success (i.e., none), and finally resigned himself -- he was, after all, married, with four children and debts -- to spending the rest of his life as a customs inspector for the city of New York. When he died, the newspaper obituary misprinted his name as "Henry Melville."

His work was never entirely forgotten, though he was chiefly regarded as a writer of sea stories (Joseph Conrad, another specialist in "the watery part of the world," didn't think much of them). And then in the 1920s a Melville revival unexpectedly kicked into gear. In 1921, Raymond Weaver brought out the first biography (Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic); in 1923, D.H. Lawrence devoted more pages to Melville in his dithyrambic Studies in Classic American Literature than to any other writer ("a deep, great artist"); in 1924, the rediscovered Billy Budd was published; and by the 1930s the poet Charles Olson had begun to track down the dispersed volumes of Melville's library in New York's used bookshops. More and ever more scholarly work appeared as teachers and critics of every theoretical bent discovered an oceanic textual richness and complexity in his masterpiece, Moby-Dick (1851). After World War II the suspicion, then conviction grew ever stronger that Melville's titanic meditation on Good and Evil, and almost everything else (except romantic love), just might be that elusive White Whale of our literature, the great American novel.

For anyone who cares about writing (or any of the arts), Melville's story is obviously both dispiriting and consoling. It is also a story that Andrew Delbanco tells surpassingly well.

Not that he hasn't had help in re-creating the writer's world. During the past 10 or 15 years we have seen no shortage of Melvillean biography, from the scholarly life's work of Hershel Parker (two daunting volumes) to the very brief Penguin volume (155 pages) by Elizabeth Hardwick. For the general reader, though, Delbanco offers a more satisfying book than either of these. First of all, this academic writes with exceptional clarity and wit (he possesses a taste for subtle, hardly noticeable wordplay). He also displays a masterly ability to summarize a book or an argument and is generous in acknowledging the scholarship of others. He periodically underscores the continued relevance of Melville's complex themes -- man's ambiguous relationship to Nature, the persistence of social and racial inequities, America's imperialistic sense of manifest destiny, the shiftiness of sexuality -- and yet he doesn't belabor the obvious or thump any tubs. This Columbia professor also surprises by including a page from a Mad magazine parody of Moby-Dick, a Gahan Wilson cartoon of Captain Ahab, and an exchange about Billy Budd (as a homosexual text) from an episode of "The Sopranos." When Delbanco writes about New York City and its importance to Melville's work, he reveals his own unambiguous but not unambivalent love for his hometown.

In short, it would be hard to imagine a more inviting overview of Melville for our time. I've admired Delbanco's work before, in particular, Required Reading, though that was essentially a collection of brief essays. This full-length study points up even more forcefully the truth of that earlier book's subtitle -- "Why Our American Classics Matter Now" -- by focusing on one major author. The result is humane and relevant scholarship at its best.

In little more than a decade -- between his mid-twenties and late-thirties -- Herman Melville produced eight or nine novels (at least one never published and now lost) and a half-dozen or so short stories. He could write with surprising speed, which may explain in part why so many of his books are rambling, disjointed, phantasmagoric, sententious and often boring. Aside from Melville scholars, who ever looks into Mardi or Israel Potter? In recent years Pierre: or the Ambiguities has gained its champions (many critics view its incest motif as a mask for Melville's possible homosexuality), while The Confidence-Man almost seems a post-modern meditation on the slipperiness of identity. Melville's poetry has been championed too, especially by Robert Penn Warren. I myself remember when "On the Slain Collegians" was widely read -- back in 1970, shortly after the killings at Kent State.

In truth, though, only four works live for us today, but what works they are! Moby-Dick, of course, but also Billy Budd, which Thomas Mann called "the most beautiful story in the world" and wished he could have written (which isn't surprising since Billy in his beauty and innocence could be the slightly more weather-beaten cousin of Tadzio in Death in Venice). Recall the story's basic plot: A handsome and guileless young seaman is falsely accused of sedition by a ship's master-at arms; in the captain's cabin Billy, after a moment of stuttering frustration, lashes out at the evil Claggart and his single blow inadvertently kills the officer, while the sympathetic Captain Vere looks on in dismay.

From this scenario Melville constructs a drama of moral (and interpretative) complexity the equal of Sophocles' Antigone. Billy Budd is, for all its gnarled and even rebarbative syntax, astonishingly moving, as it takes up such ethical heartbreakers as the fate of purity and innocence in a fallen world, the conflicts between duty and desire, legality and human compassion, and the saintly example of unqualified forgiveness. No surprise that E.M. Forster made it the libretto for that rare thing, an almost equally great and moving work of art in another medium, Benjamin Britten's opera "Billy Budd."

Sailing ships offer a confined space, almost a stage, upon which to examine the human condition. But so do business offices. Long ago, Borges recognized in Melville a precursor of Kafka, especially in the great short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853), that tale of the mousy clerk who one day, when asked to perform a simple clerical task, quietly says, "I would prefer not to." The result is an unforgettable account of existential loneliness and of our failure to connect with the less fortunate among us, but also a study in the (all too contemporary) frustration resulting when people in power, people of goodwill who view themselves as "civilized" or as upholders of propriety and tradition, must suddenly confront those who adamantly refuse to recognize their values, their authority.

Bartleby chooses a kind of civil disobedience in the face of the inhumane, but in "Benito Cereno" (1855) Melville takes this silence, this dumb-show recalcitrance, even further: He reveals what Delbanco calls "the mirroring relations between oppressor and oppressed." In this haunting masterpiece, a Capt. Delano comes to the aid of an obviously distressed slave ship, where he meets its Spanish captain and his black man-servant Babo. He is particularly impressed by the devotion demonstrated by Babo for his master -- the black man never leaves Don Benito's side. Nonetheless, the obtuse Delano feels that something on board the San Dominick isn't quite right. Today's reader will guess the truth long before he does: that the slaves have taken over the ship, and that Babo controls the captain, not the other way round.

This is, then, one of the first major works of American fiction to address the question of slavery and racial injustice, and Melville adumbrates much of our literature's exploration of this unhappy theme. Ralph Ellison, for example, took the epigraph for Invisible Man from this story:

" 'You are saved,' cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; 'you are saved; what has cast such a shadow upon you?' 'The negro.' "

Readers will note that I have said nothing very much about Moby-Dick. But what can anyone say? Its quietly portentous first sentence is as famous as any in world literature ("Call me Ishmael"), and some of Ahab's monologues, like the one beginning "Is Ahab Ahab?," achieve an eloquence rivaling that of the Bible and Shakespeare. There are longueurs, but even in the midst of tedious cetological lore, one comes across such disturbing passages as that in which the Pequod's sailors squeeze and squeeze and squeeze handfuls of white spermacetti. Then there are the marvelous portraits of the crew -- the black cabin boy Pip, who goes mad and loses his sense of self, the well-meaning but weak Starbuck, the mysterious harpooners Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo. There are the haunting encounters with other ships, especially the Rachel "searching for her lost children." And throughout there is philosophizing that at times rises to a kind of prose poetry:

"All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in a whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side."

In Melville's lifetime few recognized or even suspected the writer's exceptional genius -- but Nathaniel Hawthorne came close, and the two men established a long-lasting friendship. After their first encounters, the writer of Polynesian adventures went back to his romantic tale about "Whale Fishery" and, in Delbanco's words, "tore it up from within." Melville deepened and amplified his novel, enlarged it in every sense, with the obvious hope of joining what he called, in an essay on Hawthorne, that fraternity where "genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round." With wonderful appropriateness, then, the author of The Scarlet Letter -- which appeared in 1850 -- became the dedicatee of the following year's Moby-Dick.

In the end, perhaps the most important use of literary biography is to send us back to a writer's books with increased understanding and renewed excitement. This Andrew Delbanco certainly does for Herman Melville. We are his beneficiaries.

Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Brevity is Wit
Andrew Delbanco has given us an accessible and meaningful account of the writing, life, and world of Herman Melville. This is by no means an exhaustive biography, but Delbanco successfully gives us a good background on his life and times. He weaves literary interpretation, biography, and history into one poetic yarn. He draws on a lot of sources, including letters to or from Melville, but these sources are by no means a crutch to lean on. It was a very enjoyable read, and would be worthwhile to a literary scholar or to educated laypersons, regardless of having previously read a Melville biography or not. It is recommended that one have at least a cursory knowledge of American literature before diving into this word-storm, and I say that approvingly.

A New Study of Herman Melville
Herman Melville (1819 -- 1893) is one of the writers I have returned to again and again over the course of years. Thus, I was gratified to receive this new book by Andrew Delbanco, "Melville: His Life and Work" (2005) as a gift and to have the opportunity to read it, think again about Melville, and share my thoughts on this site with other readers. Delbanco is Levi Professor in the Humanities and Director of American Studies at Columbia University. He has published widely on American literature, including a book titled "Required Reading: why our American Classics matter now." Before reading Professor Delbanco's Melville study, I also read the lengthy review by Frederick Crews in the December 1, 2005, "New York Review" which is both laudatory and critical.

The literature on Melville continues to grow, and in recent years biographies have been published that are longer and far more detailed than Professor Delbanco's. But Delbanco's study is accessible, engagingly written, and concentrates, as the subtitle to his book implies, in placing Melville in the historical context of Nineteenth Century America, and on the works themselves. I will discuss each of these factors briefly.

As to Nineteenth Century America, Professor Delbanco discusses Melville's roots as the descendant, on both sides of his family, of heroes of the Revolutionary War. He gives a revealing picture of pre-Bellum America and of the seafaring life. He gives a detailed historical discussion, for a literary biography, of the tumults which split the United States and lead to the Civil War, including the War with Mexico, the compromises of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Professor Delbanco shows how Melville responded to both the literary and political events of his time. He also gives a good, if briefer, treatment of the Civil War and of Melville's life thereafter, as the United States expanded and a crude materialism became dominant. But most vividly, Professor Delbanco gives a picture of New York City, both before and after the Civil War, and argues convincingly for the strong formative influence that the city exerted on Melville's writings.

As to Melville's writings, Professor Delbanco devotes a great deal of space to Melville's four widely-recognized masterpieces: Moby Dick, Bartelby, Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd. He offers textual exposition, compositional background, and a good literary sense of the complexities and ambiguities in each of these works. He offers shorter yet rewarding discussions of several of Melville's more controversial efforts, including Pierre, The Confidence Man, his collection of Civil War Poetry called Battle Pieces, and the long poem Clarel. I think that Delbanco undervalues some of the poetry, particularly Battle Pieces which I have found over the years a provocative literary guide to the Civil War.

The treatment of Melville's life is interrelated well with a study of his works, as Professor Delbanco gives succint discussions of Melville's early years, his decision to go to sea, his marriage, the question of his sexual orientation, the friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, his travels and wanderings, the tragic deaths of two of his sons, and the long reclusive years Melville spent as a customs inspector in New York City. We see Melville with all his difficulties and as a great but in his lifetime forgotten writer. Readers interested in a good novelistic portrayal of Melville may wish to read Frederick Busch's "The Night Inspector", to which Professor Delbanco refers.

(...)
I came away from Professor Belbanco's book with the desire to revist some of the Melville works that I have read in the past and, perhaps, to read some of the works that I don't know for the first time. I think it is the purpose of a study such as Delbanco's to return to reader to the words of the author, in this case Melville. Delbanco's book succeeds in doing so admirably.

(...)

Delbanco skillfully brings the world of Melville to life
This biography of Melville is as balanced, accessible, and thoroughly entertaining as a biography of a literary figure can get while still being considered "serious." Delbanco has a great skills as a writer himself, skillfully juggling the story of Melville's life, critical discussions of his writing, and finally the social and historical context of the works.

The discussions of the books are excellent, particularly Delbanco's readings of the novels Moby Dick, Typee, and Pierre. But where this biography particularly stands out is the intermeshing the books with aspects of 19th century American literary culture. There are, for instance, interesting discussions of the dominance of English publishing houses, of copyright issues, of publishing in general. Delbanco situates Melville's work before a backdrop of a nation in transition (for example the story "Benito Cereno" is published in midst of the debate about the expansion of slavery into Kansas territory), and before a backdrop of the city of New York under transition too.

Finally, Delbanco discusses the unusual trajectory of Melville's own career and reputation - from almost being forgotten at the time of his death to the towering position he holds in American letters today.

This biography is a great summary of Melville's life, and also in a broader sense, of 19th century literary culture.