Melville

by Janet Robertson-Lorant

With energetic prose and a gift for relating colorful detail, Laurie Robertson-Lorant presents a richly written biography of Herman Melville, whose life of adventure, struggle, and moral conflict mirrored the themes in his writing, including his masterpiece of world literature, Moby Dick. 40 illustrations.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Literature, History

710 pages, Paperback

First published May 14, 1996

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

After p. 200.

At this point Melville has published "Mardi," which must be an extraordinarily strange fictional narrative - or rambling - or whatever it is.

Up to this point, Robertson-Lorant has rendered a highly engaging and plausible portrait of Melville. She writes in her preface that her intention was to convey the events of his life and career, his experiences of himself as he grew and changed, his responses to his world. I would say that she's succeeding admirably - as well as any reasonable person might expect.

I do object, however, to certain of her bald assertions regarding Melville's characteristics without so much as a nod to rules of evidence. So out of the blue,for example, without presentation of any facts whatsoever, she asserts Melville's "essential bisexuality." First of all what kind of orientation is that - as opposed to inessential bisexuality perhaps? She doesn't say. And whatever in the world justifies such a claim, which, in my book, should be the plausible and defensible conclusion of an argument that adduces and balances evidence rather than an assertion that requires substantiation but fails to receive it. Her claim may very well correspond to her sense of the man. But so what if it does? There's no justification for inserting such material into a biography that she presents as non-fiction.

Now it may well have been the case that, as she writes, Melville "must have" had sexual relationships with both men and women. After all there were all those sailors on-board the ships he sailed, and then there were all those "magnificently beautiful" native men of the South Pacific he encountered, and of course, all those innocent and sexually accommodating women, who weren't quite so appealing to Melville as the men. And then there are suggestive passages in "Typee" and "Omoo," but how does all that add up to demonstration of an "essential bisexuality" - even if we knew what that is? It doesn't of course, even if she is exactly correct in her sense of the man - as if she were an omniscient narrator, normally an element of fiction.

Enough of that. I can overlook a fair portion of this sort of non-sense in a highly evocative and engaging biography, which this one is, provided that this element of Melville's experience of the world turns out to be a detail that does not found her interpretation of the man. If it is, then I'll have more to write on that topic.

I've decided to experiment a bit in my reading of biography. I now have before me two biographies of Melville: Robinson-Lourant's book of some 600 pages and Parker's work that covers some 1800-1900 pages in two volumes. I've put down R-L's book for the moment to take up Parker's account up to the publication of "Mardi," when Melville was 29. Parker's book derives from his revision and updating of the "Melville Log," which a predecessor started, which appears to be a database of every known extant document relating to Melville or any of his relatives - a modern "Life Records" project. It will be interesting to see if the 600 pages that Parker needed to bring Melville to the same point in his life and career (to which point R-L required 200 pages) adds much of interest to R-L's account - or worth the reading of those additional 400 pages. Of course, I'll read both biographies, but I'll be eager to see what similarities and differences appear, in this case especially, because R-L's book and the first volume of Parker's biography appeared in the same year, 1996, if I remember correctly.

At End.
I have very serious reservations about the veracity of this biography and the credibility of its author, and in the end I must consider this book a failure of its type - although I would really rather not.

There are so many reasons.

My first clue appears among her acknowledgements. She suggests that she has lost a son, Mark, and I suspect that he died a suicide - like Melville's son Malcolm. And then she writes: "Perhaps all writing is a kind of grief work." (p. xxv) How very odd, I thought. Is she telling us now that she will be exporting her own experiences into her account of Melville's life? Why doesn't she write a memoir of Mark instead? Farther on I encounter the following: "If, as Melville says, human beings are inconsistent, ever changing, constantly evolving, and ultimately unknowable creatures, what is any novelist or biographer but a trickster and confidence man?" (p. 373) What exactly am I to make of this statement? That developing the story of a complex individual's life and character is hard, and perhaps ultimately unsuccessful in any event? Perhaps. But she is also telling me that I shouldn't necessarily believe what she writes - perhaps because her story isn't Melville's at all, but her own, that she is attempting to exorcise her own demons through her writing about a person whose life can be made to resemble the life of the person she should be narrating but can not. And then there's this comment: "As Kensaburo Oe, winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature, said recently, 'We cannot write true nonfiction. We always write fiction, but through writing fiction, sometimes we are able to arrive at the truth." (p. 585) I have read several time the paragraph in which this quote appears as well as those that precede and follow it, and for the life of me I can not understand how it relates to its context, why it's there at all. So what am I to make of it? She has claimed that Billy Budd is really Melville's admission of his responsibility for his son's suicide, and also that it's an "inside narrative" about his cousin's involvement in the wrongful death by hanging of several sailors whose trial and execution for mutiny was a hasty, trumped up affair. How can it be both? And then Oe's remark appears. What am I to make of it all? I'm rather of the opinion that the author wrote whatever she liked, and that I'm not necessarily to take her scribblings seriously.

She writes that she is attempting to "take the measure of Herman Melville," and certainly her narrative does take the measure of someone, I suppose, but not necessarily her subject. She portrays Melville as a failed husband, father and writer, who inflicted suffering on everyone in his household. Perhaps he did, but in crucial points she adduces no evidence whatever. Among the words and phrases that appear most frequently in her book are: "it appears," "must have been," "it seems likely," "it seems certain," "undoubtedly," "it's possible," and so on. She suggests possibilities, more or less plausible, often without substantiation of any kind, which she then treats as established facts in subsequent sections of her book. Certainly not the procedure of anyone who even pretends to produce non-fiction.

But what is it that seems so likely: that after the failure of his literary career, Melville drank compulsively, verbally abused his wife and children routinely, beat his wife, drove his son Malcolm to suicide, drove his son Stanwix away so that he died in poverty in San Francisco (even though she does document his case of tuberculosis), domestic horrors of every variety.

Allow me to cite one of the more egregious of her lapses. "Rumors have persisted that Melville pushed Lizzie [his wife] down the back stairs in a fit of anger, and that his in-laws were hoping he would not return from the Holy Land, but no documentary evidence for either accusation exists." (p. 373)

So where to begin? (Although the proper question is: why does this sentence appear in her book at all?) Do rumors have an existence independent of persons? Do they exist as separate entities that can persist apart from the telling? And whose rumors are these? It turns out that in 1941 (fifty years after Melville's death) someone interviewed the elderly niece of Fanny Melville, Hermann's youngest, and, as R-L reports, a person whose primary concerns were her wardrobe and "beauty sleep," and who resented her father terribly. Those rumors appear somewhere in print, and of course, because no one has destroyed every issue of the publication in which they appear, they persist - as it were. And even though "no documentary evidence exists," meaning contemporaneous evidence, I suppose, R-L retails the content of those rumors in later sections of her biography as established fact, for which she admits there is no basis in evidence. I can not fathom how she could allow herself to publish such shoddy work. Perhaps she thought no one would notice.

And why she dwells on Melville's sexuality, for which she can't even find evidence in the form of rumors, is beyond me. She posits "the desire of Victorian men to recover the androgynous natural self that had to be ruthlessly repressed in order for men to rise in a fiercely competitive hierarchy." (p. 307) Ergo, Melville harbored "an essential bisexuality." She mentions, moreover, "the Victorian soul-sickness that afflicted him." Whatever could that be? She doesn't say. But all humans are mortal; Socrates is human; therefore, Socrates is mortal, and in consequence Melville was a soul-sick Victorian male longing to live out of his repressed, androgynous natural self. After all, he died in 1891.

But then again, perhaps, as she suggests, she is telling her own story, allowing us to witness her grief work, and proffering the product of that grief work in the form of biography - trickster and confidence man that she almost admits to being - as some sort of post-modernist joke.

So who exactly is R-L writing about? I certain don't know, but my guess is that she is writing about a former husband, unfaithful, alcoholic and abusive in every possible way, whom she holds responsible for her son's (Mark's) suicide. If so, I am sorry for her loss, but I would prefer not to participate in her grief in the form of a biography of Herman Melville.

It is entirely true that I experienced not the faintest twinge of gratification in writing this appraisal of R-L's book, which she labored nine years to complete.

[Numidica · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a lot to like in this book, especially those sections which are about Melville's travels as a sailor, and the first hand accounts of interactions with Melville written by friends or acquaintances. There is a fair amount of decent analysis of his work and the influences which helped mold his books and poems. But there is, in my opinion, far too much discussion of what members of Melville's extended family were doing, or accounts of inconsequential events, written down apparently in the interest of making this the most complete biography ever of the author. I am interested in the account of Melville in Hawaii or the Marquesas, not so much the detailing of a picnic he took with his sister and her husband. Part of this I'm sure is a result of the scanty records available (mostly from letters) of Melville's life, and this same lack of source material seems to induce the author to start sentences with "Herman must have thought" or "Lizzie must have felt" because in most cases there is no direct evidence of what they thought. I also learned some things I'd rather not have about Melville, such as his abuse of his wife, though that seemed to have been more a phase than continuous throughout the marriage, not that that excuses it. For the average reader, who has read and enjoyed some of Melville's major works, I think a book half as long would have been sufficient. Part of the reason I took so long to finish it was that after racing through the chapters on his early life, I bogged down in the detailed descriptions of his life as a struggling writer, and the accounts of his many relatives, but it certainly gives a fuller picture of Melville, and his character is much as I would have expected from reading Moby-Dick or Typee.

[Mikey B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

We come out of this book (a long book of just over 600 pages) with a very personal view of Herman Melville and the era that surrounded him. Melville spent much of his life in New York City and raised his family near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, or more specifically his wife raised the children.

Melville grew up in an era which had strict gender delineations. It was a prudish age with affection between the sexes being hardly noticeable. It was more acceptable, within a certain range, for physical affection to be displayed within the same gender.

Melville’s father died when he was twelve years old. He was a failure in all his business ventures. The family had to rely on loans and handouts from other family members. Melville’s mother was Calvinist and showing tenderness and empathy to her children was not a part of her demeanor; emotional outbursts were almost prohibited. One can imagine the affect this would have on a twelve year old whose father had just died. This all became very crucial when Melville at the age of nineteen set off on his first sea voyage from New York to Liverpool. Here he was, on a boat in extreme close quarters with a group of men. After this voyage the travel bug took hold of Melville – and to some extent it never relinquished him.

At twenty he set sail on a whaling ship for a long journey to the Pacific. Along with a few other shipmates he abandoned the ship on a Pacific island. This would become, to use the nomenclature of the time, the transcendental experience of his life. It gave Melville a new spiritual vision – and he realized that he was a seeker – internally and externally. He absorbed this alternate reality from the brutal hunting of whales to natives walking topless in idyll Pacific villages using body language of physical expressiveness that was beyond the scope of repressed New Englanders’.

All this is conveyed in his books. The first few books were mildly successful like Typee and Omoo. However he was unable during his lifetime to support his wife and family from his literary output. Like his father he had to rely on family loans for support, more so from his wife’s family. Melville, at least for his first few books, held on to the illusion that he was to write the story that would vault him to literary fame. He would put his entire energy into writing – much to the annoyance of his wife and children who had to “quiet down” during these lengthy hours.

He felt a moral letdown from this non-recognition – a continual struggle to get his books published – but he wrote his entire life. In some ways his life resembles Van Gogh, but Melville lived much longer until the age of 72 (he died in 1891). Recognition of his books only started in the 1920’s with Moby Dick placing him in the forefront of American authors.

Moby Dick is a multi-faceted story that functions at many different levels. Melville had an uncanny ability to write about one object from many different perspectives. Moby Dick ranges from a first-person (Ishmael) narration to omniscient narrator. It is a “stream of consciousness” travelogue of a voyage of the sea and of the mind.

Melville was able in Moby Dick to control his literary self-obsessions. As the author says of his next book Pierre (Page 304) – “it reads like a narrative nervous breakdown”.

Page 317 (my book)
Melville, however saw the self as essentially unknowable and the universe as a conundrum, full of teasing ambiguities, which made his readers uncomfortable. He portrayed closed worlds devoid of divine order or social coherence.

The author describes each book splendidly. Melville wrote from his soul – and did little to compromise for a reading audience. With the more intense psychological explorations in art and literature – and Freud – in the Twentieth Century Melville’s books, particularly Moby Dick, found more resonance.

A few warnings:
I found the latter half of this book bogged down with unnecessary details. Too much name dropping, too many superfluous particulars like what was eaten at dinners, picnics...

There should have been an analysis of the resurgence of Melville as a writer who today is world renowned. As the author states, when Melville died he was just an obscure writer who was hardly known. How his prominence rose required an explanation – after all, this biography would not have been written if his reputation had remained as it was when he died.

After six hundred pages one does become disenchanted with this dour New Englander who, like his father before him, ignored his sons and mistreated his wife. He also spent a large amount of time away from his growing family traveling to Europe and the Middle East – and this supported financially from his wife’s side of the family. It was seen as a psychological break from his intense writing. Maybe – such is the pathway to genius?

[J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Approachable and intriguing (which you can’t say about all biographies). Doesn’t deify the man, but presents him through both literary examination and reality of others’ perspectives. Doesn’t shy away from sexuality issues but instead asks us to think about them complexly. Fantastic literary analysis as well as biographic material. How on earth is this book out of print?

[Peter Goodman · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Melville: a biography,” by Laurie Robertson Lorant (Clarkson Potter, 1996). Well, was my blurry image of Herman Melville wrong. He was not a mystic, misanthropic hermit who was forgotten by the world by the time of his death. Among other things, Robertson uses a trove of family letters that had recently been discovered, and dozens of academic papers along with the reviews, newspaper accounts, etc. Melville’s father, Allan, was an ambitious, hard-working, upright, honest, entrepreneurial failure. His ventures as a merchant tended to come up short, as he miscalculated the market, spent way too much, had bad luck, and generally did not do as well as he and those around him expected. The biggest problem is that he thought he was doing fine, spent far more than he earned, wound up terribly indebted to his family, who constantly had to bail him out with loans. Finally, Allan worked so hard and in such terrible weather that he took sick, became delirious, lost his mind, and died. Through all this, his wife Maria, of the long-established Gansevoort family, was the steady influence, keeping the family together and raising the eight children, of whom Herman was the third. (The name was originally Melvill, but Allan added the “e”.) Herman always had a wanderlust, and was always writing. He went to sea as a young man and spent four years, including time on a whaler, merchant vessels, and the American navy. These voyages took him to the Pacific, including Tahiti, the Marquesas, and the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), where he encountered a society tremendously different from the tightly wound, repressive, ambitious world of Protestant America. The men and women wore little clothing, were comfortable with sexuality of all sorts, and lived a life of comfort with all their modest needs met. Melville saw how the encroachment of the West destroyed this idyllic life with strict religion, constricting morals, and the demand to work. From these years came most of his books: first “Typee,” then “Omoo,” based closely on his time on the Pacific islands. They depict a life of sexual stimulation very different from the world of New England. Tommo, the protagonist, seems to have a love affair with a maiden named Fayaway. Tommo learns that the world of civilization is not so civilized, and that maybe cannibalism is not more barbaric than European and American customs. Both books were very popular, and Melville became famous. But he was not interested in writing popular books. His writing grew deeper and more complex, and harder to read. “Mardi” is a convoluted story that Melville meant as a depiction of a complex world, but it was hard to read and did not sell well. During all this time, finances were a constant problem. His first contracts were small; because there was no copyright convention, British publishers could and did steal American work for no royalties. Melville gradually went deeply in debt to his publishers. Nevertheless, he wrote constantly: his work was to write, and he did so every day, something like eight hours a day. “Redburn” began as an account of Melville’s own first voyage to England and became a sort of warning tale, about a sensitive young man who is brutalized and shocked by the license of the world he encounters. His best friend, Harry Bolton, becomes a male prostitute although Redburn scrupulously does not see this. This was a popular work, at last. Then came “White-Jacket,” about abuses in the US Navy based on the writer’s own experience and events in the navy around that time. His ship is a horror of floggings and mistreatment, and the story may have been instrumental in the navy’s abolition of flogging around that time. Then came “Moby-Dick,” a herculean task that consumed him and grew deeper and more profound as he went. The narrative kept drawing him further and further from the simple sea tale into an epic journey on the scale of the Iliad or the Odyssey. Early reviews were not favorable, and the book never found its readership. Next came “Pierre, or the Ambiguities,” which later scholars have argued is about Melville’s own homosexuality, or his discovery that his father had had an illegitimate child. The book was not successful. Almost nothing that he wrote carried the success of his first two books, his contracts grew thinner and thinner, he began to fade from the public eye. He stopped writing novels and began to write poetry. It was not very good, until toward the end of his life. But through the use of the newly discovered letters, Lorant shows him to be a very sociable family man, in love with his wife Lizzie, besotted with his children, dominated by his mother, but deeply enmeshed in family and society. He developed a deep, possibly sexual friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived nearby in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. She also delves deeply into the sexuality and politics of the books. Was Melville homosexual? That concept did not quite exist during his life; life on board ship promoted homosexual relations; the Pacific islanders were comfortable with all sorts of sexual expression. Lorant argues that Melville was at the least bisexual, but that his books squirm and vibrate with sexual longings and passion usually far beneath the surface of conventional life. Melville was also increasingly political; he became a strong abolitionist. In the last decades of his life his family finally wangled him a job in the Customs Office in New York (they had tried and failed to land him consular jobs in Europe). He was steady, honest in a very corrupt business, and lived so quietly that many people forgot that he was alive. I can’t do justice to the rich tapestry of life Lorant weaves, the family, friendships, etc. I really enjoyed the book and learned a great deal. I will probably now take a look at his work beyond “Moby-Dick.”

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

There have been numerous biographies written about Herman Melville, and I have no idea of which are considered best. I hadn’t read any of them, and selected this one as it was readily available from my local library. While I recently read his first two novels, TYPHEE and OMOO and had previously read four of his other novels,realized that I didn’t know that much about Melville’s life. This hefty book (600 pages) gives plenty of details of that life and I think does a good job in revealing how his life influenced what he wrote, so for me it was a very satisfying book.

I had vaguely thought of the young Melville as leading a adventurous life, going off to sea, jumping ship in the South Sea islands, and returning to write about it in the novels leading up to,and including his great work, MOBY DICK. All of this is true, but from this point on, in many ways Melville led a conventional life, marrying into a reputable New England family and fathering four children. What caused him problems, though, was that he wanted to earn his livelihood as a writer, and in mid 19th century that was very difficult to accomplish. He was financially rescued a number of times with loans and gifts from his father-in-law, a well-known and respected judge.

Melville was critical of l9th century capitalism which then, as today, divided America into the rich and the poor, and complicating this division was the issue of slavery which split the country. These tensions appear in most of his work, and lead into metaphysical questions about the nature of good and evil. Melville’s works, in one form or another, always raise the question of to what extent the artist has to conform to the norms of his society.

Those norms are established and enforced by authority figures, found in a sadly lacking Christianity in the early novels, and of course later by the crazed Captain Ahab in MOBY DICK who leads his followrs to destruction. In one of Melville’s last works, BILLY BUDD, the compulsion to maintain this authority crushes a victim. In an earlier work, THE CONFIDENCE MAN, Melville depicts how easy it is to dupe persons into societal ruin.

Melville had no answers for these conundrums. The author writes, “As a young sailor he became a man of action, according o a traditional definition of masculinity; and as a writer he mutineed against civilization's institutionalization of violence and injustice, becoming the preeminent rocker of boats in 19th century American literature. In middle-age he became the patriarch in a household that included growing sons, and at the moment he most needed wisdom and moral energy, he failed.”

“Failed”, I think in the sense that Melville was not there for his children, particularly his sons, one of whom killed himself at age 18, and the other who led a troubled life and died in his 30’s. He was successful as an artist, yes, depicting the turmoil and uncertainties of life, but a failure in being close to his sons as a father.

At the end of MOBY DICK, Ismael, as the narrator, is a redemptive creative force that bobs to the surface, the only survivor of a sunk ship, and metaphorically, a society. In BILLY BUDD, there is no survivor. Society’s iron laws are upheld, an a victim is hanged. Both in Melville’s work and in his life, there is always an ambivalence between the individual and society, between the artist and the material that he tries to transform.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I live near New Bedford where Melville set sail on his initial voyages. Each year there is a reading of Moby Dick, and the Whaling Museum is a repository of Melville-related research. Nearby Dartmouth is also the home of Laurie Robertson-Lorant, a local natural resource in her own right, whose sweeping literary biography is impressively scholarly, but also immensely readable. As I read Laurie's book I also read each of Melville's works discussed therein, from Typee to his later stories and gave Clarel a try, though this finally required more effort than I was willing to expend. The first half of the biographer's book covers Melville's literary development or, perhaps more accurately, his discovery of himself as a writer and the struggles of satisfying both reader and himself ... something Melville was never able to do in his lifetime. The latter half of Laurie's book is about Melville's quiet years, in which he worked as a customs official and wrote some of the best-known short stories we'd barely associate with the author of Moby Dick. There were many Herman Melvilles, and you can find them all in his writings from various periods. The author of this fascinating biography expertly introduces us to the many Melvilles, his complete body of work, and the many lives he lived.

[Igolder · Rating 2 out of 5]

I will let Laurie Robertson-Lorant write this review herself: "I have taken more liberties with speculation than elsewhere in an attempt to create a readable, plausible narrative based on solid inference." In other words, this is like watching The Crown. Grain of salt! Soooo many assertions are based on nothing but speculation. It may be fun to read, and maybe by sheer coincidence some of the things Laurie thinks up about what Herman Melville was feeling at any given time were true, but don't count on it.

In Robertson-Lorant's defense, it seems that most biographers of Melville find a lot of themselves reflected back when they look into the fountain that is H.M. They also argue amongst themselves and page 621 contains a special "NO THANK YOU" to Hershel Parker because she assumed The New Melville Log would come out in 1991. As I write this it is 2023 and it still has not been published.

This biography was mentioned in Dayswork, a much better book on Melville and various related topics. Dayswork's chief recommendation of this biography was that it did not weigh as much as some others, so it's easier to read in bed. Well, it is even easier to not read it at all.

[Bill O'driscoll · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quite thorough biography that debunks a few myths -- Melville wasn't a recluse in his later years, for instance -- but raises a lot of interesting questions about his sexuality, mental stability, and family life. Melville's commercial success peaked after his first two books (his pure South Seas adventures), when he was in his 20s; his three subsequent novels didn't do so well, and that was before "Moby-Dick" ran aground (though Robertson-Lorant demonstrates that the contemporaneous critical reception wasn't completely terrible, and that the book might have done better if not marketed as a mere sea adventure). Good literary analysis of the work and a strong case made for Melville as perhaps the preeminent American writer of the 19th century.

[Alex Stephenson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I understand that Robertson-Lorant takes some liberties with conclusions that she draws here, but not as egregiously as other reviews portray. It's intricately detailed and I enjoy how it serves as both a cultural and a familial biography, telling his story by telling those of the people in his life and how theirs mirrored/impacted his.

[Rick Rapp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly researched. An absolute must read to understand this complex genius of a man.