HERMAN MELVILLE

(1819-1891)

Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1, into a distinguished family. His father, Allan Melville, came from a line of wealthy Boston merchants, and his mother, Maria Gansevoort, had even more prosperous and aristocratic ancestors among the Hudson River landlords. There were Revolutionary heroes in both families.

In 1830, when Melville was ten, his father went bankrupt and the family fled New York City for a less secure life in Albany. Herman and his brothers attended Albany Academy until 1832, when their father collapsed under his anxieties, grew ill, then insane and quite suddenly, died. Maria Melville was an austere, God-fearing woman, and under these circumstances she became even more remote from her children. Melville went off to visit an uncle in the Berkshires near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He enjoyed himself so much that he remained to teach and to try his hand at writing articles and stories.

When he returned to his family, he had some of his pieces published in the local paper. However, the poverty-stricken life he faced with his family turned his thoughts toward the age- old dream of going to sea. He made his first voyage in 1839. We remained at sea for five year's.

Despite Melville's lack of formal education, he had gathered a thorough knowledge of the Bible and become a voracious reader, drawn to the best of English and American literature and philosophy. He had been storing his seafaring experiences with the idea of writing about them. Returned to the family house, he began to do just that.

In less than two years, he produced his first novel, Typee. It was autobiographical and described his experiences at sea and on Nulcu Hiva with the cannibals. When it was published in 1846 it met with immediate success. Melville dedicated the book to an old friend of his father, Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of Massachusetts; in 1847. Melville married Judge Shaw's daughter, Elizabeth.

The years after the success of Typee were enormously productive. In 1847, Melville published a sequel, entitled Omoo. Two years later he produced Mardi, the work in which he began to experiment with allegory and symbolism. The year 1849 also saw the publication of Redburn, which drew upon his experiences aboard the St. Lawrence, but in less realistic, more imaginative terms than those of the early romances. In 1850, he used his service on the United States as the basis for another, semi-autobiographical novel, entitled White-Jacket.

In the summer of 1850, Melville bought a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and settled his growing family there. He had already met Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Melville was in particular need of encouragement, for he was working on a book that would both exploit his whaling experience and, on a far more ambitious plane, seek the ultimate truth of human existence. That truth, and the mystery of whether it is benign or evil in nature, is embodied in Moby-Dick, the great white whale that gives the book its title and central symbol.

Melville found the perfect narrator for his whale story in a young man named Ishmael, who has a keen eye and a questioning voice. Moreover, he saw his main character clearly: Captain Ahab, standing on the Pequod's quarter-deck with his peg leg jammed into that accommodating hole and his heart full of brooding vengeance. In Ahab, Melville created a giant of a character, one with very few equals in American literature.

When he finished Moby-Dick in July of 1851, Melville sensed that he had taken a great risk and won, that he had written a sublime novel. He dedicated it to Hawthorne and wrote him, "I have written a wicked book but I feel spotless as a lamb."

Yet for all his bright expectations, Moby-Dick was a failure. Critics and readers alike were either puzzled or indifferent, and Melville finally had to admit that his literary career had foundered. He published the poorly received novels Pierre in 1852, Israel Potter in 1855, and The Confidence Man in 1857.

In 1856, he scraped together enough money for a trip to Europe, visiting Hawthorne in England and going on to Italy and Palestine. He returned home feeling somewhat restored by his travels, but he still could find no way out of the hopeless, impoverished life that had been thrust upon him. This same year he published a collection of stories, entitled The Piazza Tales, which included one of his finest short pieces of fiction, "Bartleby the Scrivener." It is tempting to see in the stubborn pathos of the title character something of Melville's own bitterly stung emotions.

Nevertheless, Melville never stopped writing, producing in particular a number of notable poems. Almost none of his work found a publisher, and he was obliged to bring it out in private editions of only a few copies. To end this period in Melville's life, there was further tragedy. In 1886, his son Stanwix, always an unstable wanderer, died in San Francisco.

At about the same time, Lizzie Melville came into a small inheritance which allowed her husband, at the age of sixty-seven, to retire from the customhouse and begin work on a book that would become another masterpiece. This was Billy Budd. When Melville died on September 28, 1891, the novella lay unwanted in his desk drawer. In 1924, thirty-three years later, it was published and acclaimed.

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