Melville: His World and Work [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Andrew Delbanco (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 20, 2005

With Moby-Dick Herman Melville set the standard for the Great American Novel, and with “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd he completed perhaps the greatest oeuvre of any of our writers. Now Andrew Delbanco, hailed by Time as “America’s best social critic,” uses unparalleled historical and critical perspective to give us both a commanding biography and a riveting portrait of the young nation.

The grandson of Revolutionary War heroes, Melville was born into a family that in the fledgling republic had lost both money and status. Half New Yorker, half New Englander, and toughened at sea as a young man, he returned home to chronicle the deepest crises of his era, from the increasingly shrill debates over slavery through the bloodbath of the Civil War to the intellectual and spiritual revolution wrought by Darwin. Meanwhile, the New York of his youth, where letters were delivered by horseback messengers, became in his lifetime a city recognizably our own, where the Brooklyn Bridge carried traffic and electric lights lit the streets.

Delbanco charts Melville’s growth from the bawdy storytelling of Typee—the “labial melody” of his “indulgent captivity” among the Polynesians—through the spiritual preoccupations building up to Moby-Dick and such later works as Pierre, or the Ambiguities and The Confidence-Man, His Masquerade. And he creates a vivid narrative of a life that left little evidence in its wake: Melville’s peculiar marriage, the tragic loss of two sons, his powerful friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne and scores of literary cronies, bouts of feverish writing, relentless financial pressure both in the Berkshires and in New York, declining critical and popular esteem, and ultimately a customs job bedeviled by corruption. Delbanco uncovers autobiographical traces throughout Melville’s work, even as he illuminates the stunning achievements of a career that, despite being consigned to obscurity long before its author’s death, ultimately shaped our literature. Finally we understand why the recognition of Melville’s genius—led by D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster, and posthumous by some forty years—still feels triumphant; why he, more than any other American writer, has captured the imaginative, social, and political concerns of successive generations; and why Ahab and the White Whale, after more than a century and a half, have become durably resounding symbols not only here but around the world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As Melville said of Bartleby the Scrivener, "no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man." So, notes Columbia humanities professor Delbanco (The Death of Satan), a similarly incomplete record exists for Melville. Nevertheless, in this accessible account, Delbanco both places the great novelist assuredly in his time and delves into his works' continuing significance. While Melville's career at sea initially defined his literary reputation, Delbanco also notes that an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to go west and his later return to New York City were essential to Melville's sense of the fresh, and fragile, American republic. Delbanco also traces a Romantic thread in Melville's work (he had a fascination with Frankenstein) and the impact of abolitionism, drawing a parallel between the fugitive slave cases judged by Melville's father-in-law and his portrayal of the Pequod's African-American cabin boy, Pip. Melville's gradual withdrawal from public life after Moby-Dick's failed reception added to the dearth of biographic data, but Delbanco saves most of his theorizing for Melville's work—expansively open as it is to Freudian, environmental, postcolonial and endless other interpretations. Even now, Delbanco observes, Melville's uniquely American myth of Ahab and the white whale has been recognized in President Bush's pursuit of Osama bin Laden. 57 b&w illus. (Sept. 23)
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From The New Yorker

Delbanco, a professor of American studies at Columbia, attempts to place Herman Melville and his work in the context of his time-no easy task, since Melville, after the early success of his South Seas adventures "Typee" and "Omoo," was regarded by most of his contemporaries as a freakish failure. "Moby-Dick" was widely panned, and a review of his next novel, "Pierre," was headlined "HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY." His own publishers suspected that he was going mad, and "Billy Budd" remained unpublished for thirty-three years after his death. Delbanco writes about Melville with a sympathy and passion that illuminate both his sad life and the more obscure corners of his writings. "Benito Cereno" gives perspective on the war on terror; and the much maligned "Pierre" is a "preview of the camp sensibility." Melville's very "dissonance in his own time," Delbanco writes, makes him seem at home in ours.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1St Edition edition (September 20, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375403140
• ISBN-13: 978-0375403149
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #756,192 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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34 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A New Study of Herman Melville, February 27, 2006

By 

Robin Friedman (Washington, D.C. United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Melville: His World and Work (Hardcover)

Herman Melville (1819 -- 1893) is one of the writers I have returned to again and again over the course of years. Thus, I was gratified to receive this new book by Andrew Delbanco, "Melville: His Life and Work" (2005) as a gift and to have the opportunity to read it, think again about Melville, and share my thoughts on this site with other readers. Delbanco is Levi Professor in the Humanities and Director of American Studies at Columbia University. He has published widely on American literature, including a book titled "Required Reading: why our American Classics matter now." Before reading Professor Delbanco's Melville study, I also read the lengthy review by Frederick Crews in the December 1, 2005, "New York Review" which is both laudatory and critical.

The literature on Melville continues to grow, and in recent years biographies have been published that are longer and far more detailed than Professor Delbanco's. But Delbanco's study is accessible, engagingly written, and concentrates, as the subtitle to his book implies, in placing Melville in the historical context of Nineteenth Century America, and on the works themselves. I will discuss each of these factors briefly.

As to Nineteenth Century America, Professor Delbanco discusses Melville's roots as the descendant, on both sides of his family, of heroes of the Revolutionary War. He gives a revealing picture of pre-Bellum America and of the seafaring life. He gives a detailed historical discussion, for a literary biography, of the tumults which split the United States and lead to the Civil War, including the War with Mexico, the compromises of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Professor Delbanco shows how Melville responded to both the literary and political events of his time. He also gives a good, if briefer, treatment of the Civil War and of Melville's life thereafter, as the United States expanded and a crude materialism became dominant. But most vividly, Professor Delbanco gives a picture of New York City, both before and after the Civil War, and argues convincingly for the strong formative influence that the city exerted on Melville's writings.

As to Melville's writings, Professor Delbanco devotes a great deal of space to Melville's four widely-recognized masterpieces: Moby Dick, Bartelby, Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd. He offers textual exposition, compositional background, and a good literary sense of the complexities and ambiguities in each of these works. He offers shorter yet rewarding discussions of several of Melville's more controversial efforts, including Pierre, The Confidence Man, his collection of Civil War Poetry called Battle Pieces, and the long poem Clarel. I think that Delbanco undervalues some of the poetry, particularly Battle Pieces which I have found over the years a provocative literary guide to the Civil War.

The treatment of Melville's life is interrelated well with a study of his works, as Professor Delbanco gives succint discussions of Melville's early years, his decision to go to sea, his marriage, the question of his sexual orientation, the friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, his travels and wanderings, the tragic deaths of two of his sons, and the long reclusive years Melville spent as a customs inspector in New York City. We see Melville with all his difficulties and as a great but in his lifetime forgotten writer. Readers interested in a good novelistic portrayal of Melville may wish to read Frederick Busch's "The Night Inspector", to which Professor Delbanco refers.

(...)
I came away from Professor Belbanco's book with the desire to revist some of the Melville works that I have read in the past and, perhaps, to read some of the works that I don't know for the first time. I think it is the purpose of a study such as Delbanco's to return to reader to the words of the author, in this case Melville. Delbanco's book succeeds in doing so admirably.

(...)

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Brevity is Wit, November 21, 2005

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Paul M. Mallory (MI) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Melville: His World and Work (Hardcover)

Andrew Delbanco has given us an accessible and meaningful account of the writing, life, and world of Herman Melville. This is by no means an exhaustive biography, but Delbanco successfully gives us a good background on his life and times. He weaves literary interpretation, biography, and history into one poetic yarn. He draws on a lot of sources, including letters to or from Melville, but these sources are by no means a crutch to lean on. It was a very enjoyable read, and would be worthwhile to a literary scholar or to educated laypersons, regardless of having previously read a Melville biography or not. It is recommended that one have at least a cursory knowledge of American literature before diving into this word-storm, and I say that approvingly.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Very heavy carpentry throughout., January 5, 2010

By 

Irving Warner (Fife, Washington, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Melville: His World and Work (Paperback)

Though this book received several awards for biography, and mentioned as "first rate biography' by the New York Times I can't agree. I indeed purchased Mr. Delbanco's 2006 work looking forward to reading a first rate biography on this great writer.
Instead, what I got was a long tome with complex and highly subjective psychoanalytical criticism about the Melville canon. I read little about his life, somewhat more about his times and world, and by far more about Mr. Delbanco's parsing the root behavioral causality of Melville's creations.
It was, indeed, aptly pointed out by Mr. Delbanco that Melville left a light biographical record; hence, it is difficult for the scholar to research his life at depth. Actually, a book that is by-in-large just biography would be much shorter than this work's 325 pages of text.
So there are gaps that raise constructive temptations for the scholar. As one of my graduate professors once said about a project paper, "I see some very heavy carpentry going on in this work."
And throughout Delbanco's book, there is, in my view, some heavy carpentry that is conspicuously top heavy. He does this often in Melville. Worse yet, he seemed to be primarily of the Freudian persuasion, and once that takes hold of a critic's soul, it can get very wild. There are few sexual spins that Mr. Delbanco's avoids. On the contrary, each of Melville's works is thoroughly soaked in this dubious vat.
In presenting the historical and sociological context, Mr. Delbanco's does good work, but it could have been better. Since Melville's foundational works were so tied to the South Seas and Polynesia, I thought he might have shown a more accurate historical light on it, but he did not.
By the time Melville came upon the scene , contact was nearly a century old. Depopulation was more than halfway there. The expatriate Polynesians that populated the pages of Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast were an accurate account of the time, and Dana's travels preceded Melville's.
The Marquesas, one of the root sources for Hawaii's Polynesian people, preceded Hawaii regards the travails of contact. Fact is, Typee was and remains entirely a work of fiction by a young, ambitious writer bent on writing a successful work, and he succeeded. Nothing wrong with that--and as a writer of fiction, I can relate to it absolutely.
All the spins and conjectures regards Melville's romping with Polynesian beauties with white, flashing teeth made good fiction but bad scholarship. To see a scholarly spin off on these popular myths regards serious textual issues - well, that is not impressive. By 1800, there weren't many white, gleaming teeth in Polynesia, nor, sadly, clear skins.
It was far more interesting--if you did have to get serious about psychological elements regards Melville--why he would write positively--even reinforcingly-- about carefree sexual license. Then, after returning home, he married into such a hidebound, uptight New England tradition. As Mr. Delbanco pointed out, in this culture even anatomical structures (e.g. legs, waists, etc.) weren't considered mentionable in mixed company.
One cannot feature Mr. and Mrs. New Englander chasing each other around from window seat to window seat during major sexual frolicking. For one thing was absolutely true about Polynesian culture, it was vigorous and sensual, regardless of health issues.
So, if you get this book understand what lies ahead of you. Herman Melville was a creative power of such wide scope and magnitude, that Mr. Delbanco's efforts fall way short of doing him justice.