[.ca] Herman Melville 1851-1891: A Biography (ISBN 0801881862)

a baby whale trying to get out of this behemoth:
Inside Hershel Parker's 900-page second volume of his life of Herman Melville is a 300-page biography trying to get out. The story Parker tells of the second half of Melville's career--from the failure of Moby Dick in 1851 through the forty years Melville slowly disappeared from the American consciousnes--is a fascinating, corrective tale of the blindness of American critics and readers alike. (At the end of his life, in 1891, his rebirth was just beginning, in England, but in the U.S. he was considered a failure--when he was considered at all. He would not be rediscovered here until the 1920s.) But in Parker's biography, that fascinating story is lost among the doings of the dozens of relatives who made up Melville's family, and whose manuscripts--letters, diaries, notes--Parker uses exhaustively. We learn more finally about 19th century extended family life than we do about the man at the center of this one. Melville's story is a sad one, but Parker could have told it in a third of this length.

Tedious Beyond Belief:
Little is known about the last forty reclusive years of Melville's life, and Parker adds virtually nothing of significance to alleviate that dearth of knowledge or insight. If you are fascinated by reams of inconsequential family correspondence, you will enjoy this book. If you are interested in Herman Melville, don't waste your time on this boring tome.

Stoic endurance and masterful control:
Hershel Parker has given Melville scholars and enthusiasts a valuable gift -- a scholarly examination of a life embedded in a rich context of significant relationships. Parker's presentation of evidence is all we can hope for -- a carefully balanced narrative based on primary sources where the reader benefits from a scholar's lifetime of careful research and thoughtful consideration. Drawing from an astounding wealth of primary sources, Parker walks us through Melville's life with a chronological continuity that scarcely misses a month of activity in a forty year period, articulating in rich detail Melville's interactions with people, places, and publications. Through a careful accounting of time and travels, many puzzles are brought into clearer light. Volume Two begins with the puzzle of The Whale's reception -- Melville may never have learned of the broad praise for The Whale in England, despite the disconcerting omission of the book's final chapter by the publisher. Next, the puzzle of Pierre's career as a Young Author -- prompted by Evert Duykinck's evident betrayal as much as a devaluation of his earning potential by the Harpers, Melville interpolated a satirical diabtribe into the innovative psychological romance, Pierre. We discover lost works -- Melville developed at least three major works that were never published: Isle of the Cross (rejected), the Tortoise Hunters (incomplete or discarded), and a volume of poems in 1860 (rejected). We find what happened between his last magazine publication and the start of the Civil War: we are given a clear picture of Melville's three winters on the lecture circuit, during which he began a dedicated effort to convert from prose to poetry. Finally, we discover Melville the poet -- while holding down a low-paid job to support his family, Melville stoically endures a long period of discouraging personal setbacks during which he improves his mastery of metrical form through dedicated study and artful discernment. His creative mind is constantly at work, although his energies are strained by competing demands on his attention. With Clarel, Melville demonstrates a masterful control of theme, form, and allusion, and with John Marr and Timoleon, we meet a poet who innovated constantly, re-working and improving his stylistic experiments over many years. Melville's mid-life challenges are of the sort that most humans face, complicated by an uncertain career, the death of two sons, and an awkward estrangement from his wife (temporary) and daughters (permanent?). He outlives most of his close relatives and friends, people he loved and who loved him, and on whom he relied for decades. Melville's natural tendency toward a self-contained privacy leads him toward a stoical reclusiveness, although he remains actively engaged with the world throughout his restless wanderings, both physical and philosophical. The biography concludes on an upward note; late in life, Melville learns by degrees of a dedicated following in England, while some of his best work is still in manuscript form, waiting to be printed some thirty years after his death. The great pleasure of reading Parker is the way he interpolates explanations as an aid to the reader's assessment, scrupulously avoiding any forced conclusions based on ambiguous evidence. With Parker, the author is in control of the presentation, but we are allowed to apply our own critical thought toward the evidence. No conclusions are forced on us, and we encounter few intrusions by the biographer. To my mind, this is an ideal biography.