Melville Quotes

“It is the rare young writer who does not fall in love with the idea of becoming famous, and Melville was no exception. When he remarked years later to Hawthorne that no man “who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows,” he was reproving his younger self for having craved it.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“However historically or prophetically one prefers to read him, Ahab is a brilliant personification of the very essence of fanaticism, and therefore too grand a conception to be confined to any one exemplar of it.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“Since Melville left no glossary, all such alignments between actual historical figures and their fictional counterparts in Moby-Dick are disputable; but it is beyond dispute that as he reworked his story of the fatal hunt, he was increasingly preoccupied by the several “Senators and Judges” who were leading the nation toward civil war.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“By deploying these freighted political symbols, Melville introduced into Moby-Dick a critique of the expansionist policy of the American Democracy—a party still held in the death grip of Calhoun, and still, despite its internal dissensions and Taylor’s victory, the most powerful organized political force in the nation.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“As the American political system went to pieces before his eyes, Melville saw in Calhoun one model for his haunted captain; but more than that, he turned the Pequod into a sort of Democratic Party death convention—a ship of political fools sailing headlong for disaster. To the metaphysics, formal experiments, and maritime realism of Moby-Dick he added a layer of political satire:”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“News of Calhoun’s death gave retrospective authority to his own warning that all efforts had failed “to prevent excitement and preserve quiet” between the northern and southern wings of the Democratic Party, which was known throughout the nation as the “American Democracy.” Virtually”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“the South drew its venom. When the captain of a passing ship begs for help in searching for his son, who has fallen overboard, Ahab stands unmoved “like an anvil, receiving every shock but without the least quivering of his own,” and replies, “I will not do it. Even now, I lose time.” The notoriously cold Calhoun could not have done better—or worse. It was natural for Melville to have this fearsome”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“Moby-Dick became in the broadest sense a political novel. Melville made of the Pequod a mirror of America rushing westward, poisoning itself by eating up a continent, “a cannibal of a craft … tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies,”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“Melville was recalling here an incident from his time aboard the Acushnet, when a young black sailor named Backus had leapt overboard during a chase. Now he turned the event into what must surely be the most terrifying image of human loneliness conceived by an American artist until the scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (a very Melvillean film) in which the doomed astronaut clutches at his severed air hose while tumbling into the blackness of space.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“but in Moby-Dick, politics became a central element in the larger constellation of themes, as if the incidental realism of Redburn and White-Jacket had been melded with the political allegory of Mardi. The Pequod becomes a replica of the American ship of state; its thirty-man crew (“isolatoes federated along one keel”) matched in number the thirty states that constituted the Union in 1850. The Pequod’s labor system, made up of white overseers and dark underlings, replicates that of “the American army and military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the construction of the”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“American Canals and Railroads.” And in an echo of a stock image in contemporary political cartoons showing”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“Melville regarded slavery, in other words, as a crime not only against one subjugated race but against humanity (a “sin it is, no less;—a blot, foul as the crater-pool of hell,” he wrote in Mardi), yet he was not sure where to place responsibility for it or how to begin to redress it. For one thing, he doubted that northerners were morally superior merely because the slave system had never established itself in their part of the country. Naval officers “from the Southern States,” he wrote in White-Jacket, “are much less severe, and much more gentle and gentlemanly … than the Northern officers”—”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“them in order to get on with the great chase; but it is here that Melville makes his case, with tongue in cheek, against all forms of classification—including the racial form. “It is in vain,” he writes, with more than whales in mind, “to attempt a clear classification of the Leviathan,”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“Africa (1799), or was at least favorably aware of Park’s account of the kindness, refinement, and modesty of African mothers. One consequence of Melville’s years at sea was a certain cosmopolitan amusement at how human beings organize themselves into ranks, and at how those doing the organizing always reserve a place for themselves at the top.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“Emerson spoke compassionately about fugitive slaves, he also wrote in his journal that “so inferior a race must perish shortly like the Indians,” while Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, put the Negro just above the baboon in the great chain of being. These attitudes were so widespread that in 1842, while touring the United States, the English naturalist Charles Lyell was amazed at “the extent to which the Americans carry their repugnance to all association with the coloured race on equal terms.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“ashamed to be a beneficiary of the symmetry. But like virtually everyone in his time, including most abolitionists, he took for granted that some sort of racial hierarchy had always existed and always would. Even the belligerently egalitarian Whitman, whose panoptic poems tend to blur all human subjects into a monochrome crowd (“each answering all, each sharing the earth with all”), was not above speaking of black people as a “superstitious, ignorant, and thievish race.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“As Melville’s rather puerile sketches in Yankee Doodle and the political chapters of Mardi had made clear, he was, at best, a halfhearted political satirist. Politics never engaged him deeply. Passage of the Fugitive Slave Law did not incite him to loud outrage as it did contemporaries such as Emerson, who declared that “I wake in the morning with a painful sensation” at the smell of “infamy in the air,” or Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in hot fury at what she regarded as Webster’s perfidy.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“For years, northerners had managed to convince themselves that slavery was somebody else’s problem. Yet everyone knew that northern banks invested heavily in cotton, and that in some northern ports the slave trade itself continued as an illegal, but tacitly permitted, smuggling business. In 1846, with war against Mexico looming, Theodore Parker had remarked that “Northern Representatives … are no better than Southern Representatives; scarcely less in favor of slavery, and not half so open.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“Men as prudent as Tocqueville and Jefferson had predicted that sooner or later the United States would collapse into a war between the races or a war over race. “We have the wolf by the ears,” Jefferson had written about slavery in 1820, “and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“The defeat of Mexico at first seemed another step toward the glorious fulfillment of America’s manifest destiny, but it turned out to be one of those instances with which history is replete, in which military victory sets off a political crisis in the land of the victor. “The United States will conquer Mexico,” Emerson declared in 1846, “but it will be as the man who swallows the arsenic which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.” Privately,”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“As the art historian Meyer Schapiro has said of expressionist and post-expressionist painting, “the subjective becomes tangible,” by which he means that on a canvas by, say, Monet or Cézanne, we see in “the mark, the stroke, the brush, the drip”—none of which is effaced or concealed—“the drama of decision in the ongoing process of art.” Melville’s creative process in Moby-Dick was the verbal equivalent of the “tangible subjectivity” that he had seen in the canvases of Turner. As the English critic Henry Chorley wrote astutely in 1850, “Mr. Melville stands as far apart from any past or present marine painter in pen and ink as Turner does” from lesser painters.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“The great book that carried Melville away between the spring of 1850 and the summer of 1851 was a young man’s coming-of-age story, an encyclopedic inventory of facts and myths about whales, a concatenation, as Duyckinck described it with fond bewilderment, “of romance, philosophy, natural history, fine writing, good feeling, [and] bad sayings.” It was all these things, but it was also an audacious attempt, long before Freud and his modernist followers, to represent in words the unconscious as well as conscious processes of the human mind itself.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“work is to register the improvisational nature of experience, it must be as spontaneous and self-surprising as the human mind itself. Aware, as Freud later puts it, that “in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish,” Melville also knew that by concealing the existence of earlier versions of his work, he ran the risk of falsifying himself.* In this sense, Moby-Dick was like an active archeological site in which the layers of its own history are left deliberately exposed.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“Moby-Dick was Melville’s vampire book. It sapped him—but not before he had invented a new kind of writing that, we can now see, anticipated the kind of modernist prose that expresses the author’s stream of consciousness without conscious self-censorship. Melville”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“The Leviathan of Isaiah, Psalms, and the Book of Job, so fierce that it makes the ocean heave and boil, comes alive as a symbol of inscrutable strength, and Melville conscripts a whole army of mythic warriors—“Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo”—into the family of gallant whalemen who defy and pursue it. “Towards thee I roll,” cries Ahab in his last outburst of half-sacred, half-demonic rage, “thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” The whole of humankind seems to pass through these pages, as if Moby-Dick were an encyclopedia of “heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets” to whom lesser men turn for guidance and grace when facing the terrors of the deep.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“With his head brimming with these and many other instigating readings—Virgil and Milton; Goethe’s musings on the “Titanic, gigantic, heaven-storming” Prometheus; William Beckford’s Arabian romance, Vathek; Carlyle’s portrait of Cromwell in Heroes and Hero-Worship; Shelley’s mad scientist; a slew of whaling books—the idea of Captain Ahab began to take form.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“And then there was Frankenstein. While in London, Melville had acquired from Bentley a copy of Mary Shelley’s novel about an errant genius who hunts down the quasi-human monster he has created after it has turned against him and murdered the woman he loves. Having tracked the creature to the icy North, Frankenstein commandeers a scientific expeditionary ship headed to the Arctic and turns it into an instrument of his private vengeance. This story of obsession and revenge so captured Melville’s imagination that when he read in Lamb’s Final Memorials about William Godwin’s (Mary Shelley’s father) gift for creating characters “marvellously endowed with galvanic life,” he wrote in the margin: “Frankenstein.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“before his trip to England, he had bought on account Harper’s Classical Library, which included John Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid. In Mardi, he had mentioned “Virgil my minstrel,” and in White-Jacket, the sight of Jack Chase encouraging the poet Lemsford had put him in mind of the Roman patron “Mecaenas listening to Virgil, with a book of the Aeneid in his hand.” But these pro forma nods toward the Roman poet had been conventionally reverent; it was not until sometime in 1850 that Melville had his true encounter with the Aeneid and found himself recapitulating Virgil’s story of a haunted mariner voyaging out to avenge a grievous loss.* The men of Moby-Dick are Virgilian wanderers. They long for home even as fate calls them away from “safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities.” Early in the book, one hears echoes of Virgil’s account of the Trojan mariners preparing, after brief respite, to set sail again with ships newly caulked as Queen Dido watches them from a hilltop in Carthage.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“with merry shouts and laughter.” For the history of literature, the important occurrence on Monument Mountain was the immediate and intense connection established that day between Melville and Hawthorne. The older man (Hawthorne was forty-six) had reviewed Typee four years earlier, and his interest in Melville was now renewed by their meeting, which a local journalist reconstructed some thirty years later: “One day it chanced that when they were out on a pic-nic excursion, the two were compelled by a thunder-shower to take shelter in a narrow recess of the rocks of Monument Mountain. Two hours of enforced intercourse settled the matter. They learned so much of each other’s character, and found that they held so much of thought, feeling and opinion in common, that the most intimate friendship for the future was inevitable.” Within a few days, Hawthorne got hold of every book Melville had written and, as Sophia wrote to Duyckinck, read rapidly through them while lying “on the new hay in the barn.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“A year earlier, when the evening air started to have an autumn bite, Melville had begun to turn his whaling adventure into the most ambitious book ever conceived by an American writer.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work