Mount TBR #49

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Herman Melville: A Critical Biography– Newton Arvin

This biography of the author of the famous American novel about a whale won the National Book Award in 1950. In this pleasantly written book, Arvin nearly balances biographical information with critical views of the novels. Melville grew up in a family that was affluent until business reverses suddenly bankrupted his father in 1830. His father went into a slough of despair. After two weeks of bed-ridden agonies, he died. Arvin, without ostentation, wonders about the effect those two weeks would have had on a young boy.

Born under a wandering star, Melville took to sea in his early twenties, sailing first to England, then to Polynesia, where he found himself pursued by cannibals, becoming a mutineer, and getting it on with comely island maids. His first works were wild hits; an experimental novel failed; back to popular stuff twice;  then the novel about the whale. Post-Moby, the novels, experimental in daring and generally sad in tone, were only partly successful as art, misunderstood even by sympathetic contemporary readers, and commercial duds. Melville lived with his family in tight circumstances, working as a customs agent in New York City when federal employees were paid just about nothing.

I like these old-timey biographies, nicely written for general thinking readers unlike today’s jargon ridden biographies. Arvin places Melville in a context I needed to know, i.e., his place among writers such as Dana, Hawthorne, James, Cooper, and Henry Adams. Arvin is pretty daring when it comes to speculating on the unknowable. That is, he draws on the novels Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn and White-Jacket for biographical purposes as well as critical observations. I guess since what went on in Melville’s head in his twenties is impossible to know, one may as well proceed as if information in a novel can give insight in that unknowable terrain.

The survey of "The Whale" is the center-piece of the book. The part about Melville as poet was interesting.