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Herman Melville: A Biography #2
Herman Melville: A Biography
The first volume of Hershel Parker's definitive biography of Herman Melville—a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize—closed on a mid-November day in 1851. In the dining room of the Little Red Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts, Melville had just presented an inscribed copy of his new novel, Moby-Dick, to his intimate friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the man to whom the work was dedicated. "Take it all in all," Parker concluded, "this was the happiest day of Melville's life."
Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 2, 1851-1891 chronicles Melville's life in rich detail, from this ecstatic moment to his death, in obscurity, forty years later. Parker describes the malignity of reviewers and sheer bad luck that doomed Moby-Dick to failure (and its author to prolonged indebtedness), the savage reviews he received for his next book Pierre, and his inability to have the novel The Isle of the Cross—now lost—published at all. Melville turned to magazine fiction, writing the now-classic "Bartleby" and "Benito Cereno," and produced a final novel, The Confidence Man, a mordant satire of American optimism. Over his last three decades, while working as a customs inspector in Manhattan, Melville painstakingly remade himself as a poet, crafting the centennial epic Clarel, in which he sorted out his complex feelings for Hawthorne, and the masterful story "Billy Budd," originally written as a prose headnote to an unfinished poem.
Through prodigious archival research into hundreds of family letters and diary entries, newly discovered newspaper articles, and marginalia from books that Melville owned, Parker vividly recreates the last four decades of Melville's life, episode after episode unknown to previous biographers. The concluding volume of Herman Melville: A Biography confirms Hershel Parker's position as the world's leading Melville scholar, demonstrating his unrivaled biographical, literary, and historical imagination and providing a rich new portrait of a great—and profoundly American—artist.
Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 2, 1851-1891 chronicles Melville's life in rich detail, from this ecstatic moment to his death, in obscurity, forty years later. Parker describes the malignity of reviewers and sheer bad luck that doomed Moby-Dick to failure (and its author to prolonged indebtedness), the savage reviews he received for his next book Pierre, and his inability to have the novel The Isle of the Cross—now lost—published at all. Melville turned to magazine fiction, writing the now-classic "Bartleby" and "Benito Cereno," and produced a final novel, The Confidence Man, a mordant satire of American optimism. Over his last three decades, while working as a customs inspector in Manhattan, Melville painstakingly remade himself as a poet, crafting the centennial epic Clarel, in which he sorted out his complex feelings for Hawthorne, and the masterful story "Billy Budd," originally written as a prose headnote to an unfinished poem.
Through prodigious archival research into hundreds of family letters and diary entries, newly discovered newspaper articles, and marginalia from books that Melville owned, Parker vividly recreates the last four decades of Melville's life, episode after episode unknown to previous biographers. The concluding volume of Herman Melville: A Biography confirms Hershel Parker's position as the world's leading Melville scholar, demonstrating his unrivaled biographical, literary, and historical imagination and providing a rich new portrait of a great—and profoundly American—artist.
- GenresBiographyNonfiction
1056 pages, Hardcover
Published May 8, 2002
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About the author
Hershel Parker
65 books7 followersHershel Parker is the H. Fletcher Brown Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware, the General Editor for the final two volumes of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, and the author of several books, including Melville: The Making of the Poet, Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative, and Herman Melville: A Biography, a finalist in 1997 for the Pulitzer Prize.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 22, 2012
After p. 550 of volume 2
After 1400-1500 pages (who can count at this point?) of Parker's biography, I'm beginning to adapt to Parker's method and to discern the reason (I suspect) for his massive compilation of detail.
Let's say that Parker should have entitled his biography: "Herman Melville: A Biography or Life in a Swarm." And a swarm it was - life in, among and between a succession of multi-generational households, expanding with the births of ever more offspring and contracting with the inevitable deaths of grandparents and the odd consumptive and inebriate. Scores and scores of Melvilles, cousins out to the third and fourth degree of consanguinity. And they all visited and corresponded!
But what's so very interesting in this biography is that Parker actually shows Melville's life in that swarm - and that's why the detail is essential. Parker had first to show the life of the swarm and then to depict Melville's life and place in it - as he gained prominence as head of family when various males died and as he lost his position as various brothers-in-law appeared and as his own brother Allen became a grasping and very wealthy man. In short, Melville appears and disappears and appears again in Parker's pages. And that's exactly how he was perceived - first as a non-entity who could never measure up to his older brother, then as a person of significance in his own right and then as a non-entity, a failure, a nobody or worse, a pitiable sponge whose literary career failed utterly and who lived from hand to mouth on his father-in-law's handouts and then from his wife's inherited wealth, then again as a certain someone who could support himself and contribute a pittance to his family's support and scribble something of interest from time to time - all very interesting perhaps, but nothing much beyond self-indulgence and vanity. Extraordinary - not one person in that swarm understood or could even begin to perceive the magnitude of his aspiration or achievement.
I should also note that all this detail gives one insight into the process by which Melville lost himself - for decades a shattered human being after critics robbed him of his literary career. Small wonder. After all how could a religious skeptic, a cultural relativist, an anti-imperialist, an enemy of all convention such as he gain a following in that time and place - or at any time and in any place? Not possible. That's not particularly illuminating. What is extraordinary is the description, step by tiny step, of his break-down. I don't refer to a psychotic break - at all. I refer to the process by which an individual suddenly recognizes that his hopes and aspirations can never be realized, that he is not the person he might have imagined himself to be, etc., and something inside simply breaks.
I've experienced two or three such moments. It's quite palpable. The shoulders drop, the head bends, one feels as if one doesn't possess the strength to hold oneself upright - and fatigue almost overwhelms. One looses all affect, any capacity to view persons as anything other than more or less interesting objects of observation.
Of course, Parker doesn't narrate these moments. Melville didn't document them. And there I go - exporting my own experience into another life - quite the biographer's no-no. But moments such as these are there as sub-text in Parker's biography - when Melville disappears from his own life's story. And that's what he did. The life of the swarm continued, while Herman wanted nothing so much as to disappear altogether - which he did to a remarkable degree. And so Parker continues his narration of the life of the swarm - with no Herman in sight - and when Herman connected with that life again, so he appears in Parker's pages again.
I've never encountered such a biography before. Quite original and unprecedented.
At End.
I have little to add to these comments. A superlative achievement.
I do have one complaint, however, and one only.
I suspect that in preparing his biography (without footnotes) Parker followed the contents of the Melville Log very closely and carefully, except in one instance that I find extremely annoying. No one has quite explained why Melville decided to write a book like "Pierre," which departs so radically from anything he had written earlier - or later - that critics are entirely at a loss to account for its existence in any manner that merits serious consideration. I am satisfied with "because he wanted to," which is the only conclusion that evidence supports. Others, including Parker, seek the origins of that book in a life event - in the simple minded assumption that the work necessarily flows from quotidian experience. Nonsense. So Parker offers up the following (p. 59):
"In recent months, in the close confines of Arrowhead [Melville's farmhouse], Maria [Melville's insufferably stupid, self-satisfied, vacuous and overbearing mother] may have said "a sainted man like your [deceased] father" once too often in Herman's ears - or even more pointedly something like, "Why can't you be a Christian such as your sainted father was?" Something of that sort may have prompted Melville to create a plot that could only bring opprobrium to the family, either because there was some truth in it, or because people would assume there was truth in it. Adding injury to insult, Herman, in among innocuous family paraphernalia, had appropriated the highly recognizable "chair portrait" of his father and made it the subject of disturbing sexual speculations. Readers of "Pierre" who knew the Melville family would think the worst of Allan Melvill, regardless of what was true and what was fiction."
These sentences left me slack-jawed. There are so many transgressions against any credible biographical procedure that it's pointless to enumerate them all. But note how the "may haves" become "fact," which then explains another "fact" that is also without any foundation in evidence.
Shame on you Hershel Parker!
I've vented, but I really wish he hadn't marred an otherwise entirely laudable work.
After 1400-1500 pages (who can count at this point?) of Parker's biography, I'm beginning to adapt to Parker's method and to discern the reason (I suspect) for his massive compilation of detail.
Let's say that Parker should have entitled his biography: "Herman Melville: A Biography or Life in a Swarm." And a swarm it was - life in, among and between a succession of multi-generational households, expanding with the births of ever more offspring and contracting with the inevitable deaths of grandparents and the odd consumptive and inebriate. Scores and scores of Melvilles, cousins out to the third and fourth degree of consanguinity. And they all visited and corresponded!
But what's so very interesting in this biography is that Parker actually shows Melville's life in that swarm - and that's why the detail is essential. Parker had first to show the life of the swarm and then to depict Melville's life and place in it - as he gained prominence as head of family when various males died and as he lost his position as various brothers-in-law appeared and as his own brother Allen became a grasping and very wealthy man. In short, Melville appears and disappears and appears again in Parker's pages. And that's exactly how he was perceived - first as a non-entity who could never measure up to his older brother, then as a person of significance in his own right and then as a non-entity, a failure, a nobody or worse, a pitiable sponge whose literary career failed utterly and who lived from hand to mouth on his father-in-law's handouts and then from his wife's inherited wealth, then again as a certain someone who could support himself and contribute a pittance to his family's support and scribble something of interest from time to time - all very interesting perhaps, but nothing much beyond self-indulgence and vanity. Extraordinary - not one person in that swarm understood or could even begin to perceive the magnitude of his aspiration or achievement.
I should also note that all this detail gives one insight into the process by which Melville lost himself - for decades a shattered human being after critics robbed him of his literary career. Small wonder. After all how could a religious skeptic, a cultural relativist, an anti-imperialist, an enemy of all convention such as he gain a following in that time and place - or at any time and in any place? Not possible. That's not particularly illuminating. What is extraordinary is the description, step by tiny step, of his break-down. I don't refer to a psychotic break - at all. I refer to the process by which an individual suddenly recognizes that his hopes and aspirations can never be realized, that he is not the person he might have imagined himself to be, etc., and something inside simply breaks.
I've experienced two or three such moments. It's quite palpable. The shoulders drop, the head bends, one feels as if one doesn't possess the strength to hold oneself upright - and fatigue almost overwhelms. One looses all affect, any capacity to view persons as anything other than more or less interesting objects of observation.
Of course, Parker doesn't narrate these moments. Melville didn't document them. And there I go - exporting my own experience into another life - quite the biographer's no-no. But moments such as these are there as sub-text in Parker's biography - when Melville disappears from his own life's story. And that's what he did. The life of the swarm continued, while Herman wanted nothing so much as to disappear altogether - which he did to a remarkable degree. And so Parker continues his narration of the life of the swarm - with no Herman in sight - and when Herman connected with that life again, so he appears in Parker's pages again.
I've never encountered such a biography before. Quite original and unprecedented.
At End.
I have little to add to these comments. A superlative achievement.
I do have one complaint, however, and one only.
I suspect that in preparing his biography (without footnotes) Parker followed the contents of the Melville Log very closely and carefully, except in one instance that I find extremely annoying. No one has quite explained why Melville decided to write a book like "Pierre," which departs so radically from anything he had written earlier - or later - that critics are entirely at a loss to account for its existence in any manner that merits serious consideration. I am satisfied with "because he wanted to," which is the only conclusion that evidence supports. Others, including Parker, seek the origins of that book in a life event - in the simple minded assumption that the work necessarily flows from quotidian experience. Nonsense. So Parker offers up the following (p. 59):
"In recent months, in the close confines of Arrowhead [Melville's farmhouse], Maria [Melville's insufferably stupid, self-satisfied, vacuous and overbearing mother] may have said "a sainted man like your [deceased] father" once too often in Herman's ears - or even more pointedly something like, "Why can't you be a Christian such as your sainted father was?" Something of that sort may have prompted Melville to create a plot that could only bring opprobrium to the family, either because there was some truth in it, or because people would assume there was truth in it. Adding injury to insult, Herman, in among innocuous family paraphernalia, had appropriated the highly recognizable "chair portrait" of his father and made it the subject of disturbing sexual speculations. Readers of "Pierre" who knew the Melville family would think the worst of Allan Melvill, regardless of what was true and what was fiction."
These sentences left me slack-jawed. There are so many transgressions against any credible biographical procedure that it's pointless to enumerate them all. But note how the "may haves" become "fact," which then explains another "fact" that is also without any foundation in evidence.
Shame on you Hershel Parker!
I've vented, but I really wish he hadn't marred an otherwise entirely laudable work.
June 5, 2012
Lengthy biography, 2V, nearly 2,000 pages. Author often repeats entire paragraphs as if a cut and paste rewrite was done without editing. Far too much information included about H.M.'s family which doesn't contribute to his writings or personal character. Certainly it is the definitive research tome for Melville. Surprise is that there exists or existed a "lost" Melville novel, "Isle of the Cross"
May 3, 2020
See comments on Vol #1.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews