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Herman Melville: The Basic Facts


ISSUE:  Winter 1952

 

The Melville Log: Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891. By Jay Leyda. Harcourt, Brace and Company. Two volumes. $12.50. Herman Melville Biograpby By Leon Howard. University of California Press. Melville’s Early Life and “Redbum.” By William H. Gilman. New York University Press. 

 

JAY LEYDA’S “The Melville Log” is a prodigy of scholarly patience, ingenuity, and invention. So far as I know, nothing of the sort has ever been assembled and published. Mr. Leyda’s aim, as he says in his Introduction, was “to give each reader the apparatus to be his own biographer of Herman Melville, by providing him with the largest possible quantity of materials to build his own approach to this complex figure.” Every discoverable item relevant to Melville’s life has been entered in the log under its appropriate date: extracts from Melville’s letters and from letters written to him; entries in diaries, inscriptions in presentation copies of his books; tax records, publisher’s records; items from naval records and  newspaper gossip columns; hook reviews; and so on, almost adinfinitum–enough, at least, to fill two fat volumes and 899 pages.

One might suppose that the result would he chaos, but such is not the fact, if the reader opens the “Log” with even a moderate interest in Melville or will have the patience to bear with the compiler for a time until the many fascinating complexities of Melville’s biography begin to become apparent. For the story of Melville’s life is in itself a great mystery story, full of strange turns and surprising incidents. It is all the more fascinating because Melville so infrequently speaks out. Only twice did he keep an extended journal and for some years in his life letters written by him are almost non-existent. It is therefore all the more exciting to be able to glimpse him in one crisis after another through the eyes of relatives or friends or chance acquaintances.

There are, of course, some disadvantages in Mr. Leyda’s method, as he would, I am sure, admit readily enough. He cannot print all of the Melville letters which are extant; thus the extract given us from a particular letter may not be the one which a scholar using the “Log” most wishes to have. Still, what has been left out is inconsiderable in comparison with what has been included and for the most part adequate, though rather cryptic, documentation has been provided for the reader who needs to have what he does not get. Occasionally, too, passages call for footnotes which could not be given them because of the form in which the “Log” is set up and the reader is left wondering just what national or local event, what plague or fire or accident is being alluded to. Now and again some incident in Melville’s life for which abundant evidence is provided in the “Log” needs the interpreting hand of the biographer. Such is the case, I feel, with the Philo Logos controversy in which Melville engaged when he was a lively youngster in Albany, glorying for the first time in intellectual company and literary combat. Mr. Leyda gives us most of the documents but they demand interpretation. Without such information the reader is likely to make more (or less) of the episode than he should. Occasionally, too, Mr. Leyda’s zeal in discovering leads him to items which are not especially illuminating.

There is no need to cavil further. “The Melville Log” will delight all Melville enthusiasts and for a variety of reasons. Gathered in these two volumes are more of his letters, though in excerpted form, than can he found anywhere else. Almost all of Melville’s letters are interesting and many of them, those to Hawthorne, for example, are among the best in the language. If we cannot yet have the collected letters and it is a disgrace to American  literary scholarship that we do not have them), then this is a useful substitute. Next in importance, to my mind, is the context for important events and crises in Melville’s life which the “Log” faithfully furnishes one watches with great fascination as one story after another of this kind unfolds before his eyes. There sits Maria Melville in Lansingburgh, trying to hold her young brood together on nothing a year, complaining to brothers Peter and Herman because they do not send help to a poor widow. Some miles away in Albany sits brother Peter, supposedly a rich man but, caught like everyone else in the aftermath of the panic of 1837, able to squeeze out only $50for her assistance, and that only after sharp prodding from Maria. Small wonder that Herman at this stage takes to the sea, in order to remove one mouth from the family table.

This context supplied by the cross-ruff of letters and family gossip again and again alters the accepted reading  of Melville’s lift at a particular point or gives it a new coloring. Thus we find that we have listened too exclusively to what Melville’s wife had to say about his ill health after the exhausting months spent on the ill-fated  “Pierre.” The  “Log” shows that Melville was-outwardly at any rate-not nearly so low in spirits as we had supposed or so discouraged with authorship. Possibly the most revealing part of the “Log,” so far as this matter of context is concerned, is the collection of entries for the months when  “Moby-Dick” was being written. Melville was undeniably on the crest of the wave, a delightful host, an irresistible companion, a happy husband and father.  One can feel the energy and high spirits of those months as they flow from him into the great book which he was then broiling. Similarly at the other end of the scale, in the quiet last years, the context bears out what his earliest biographer, J. E. A. Smith, remarked: that his conversation, during his last  visit  to  Pittsfield, “had  much of his jovial, let-the-world-go-as-it-will spirit.” The letters, and who chance remarks of friends who recorded their visits with himindicate that this was so: The old tensions and bitterness were gone.  He had found how to live and to grow old.

The “Log” gives one a unique opportunity, as a biography could not do, of following through with individuals who touched Melville’s life. Here, completely outlined, is the story of his brilliant, ambitious, aggressive older brother Gansevoort who died in London at thirty-one. Here is the sad story of his cousin Guert, whose tragedy became Captain Vere’s in ”Billy Budd.”  Guert was the perfect young naval officer, but he was pursued all his life by the guilt which settled on him when he brought to light, as he believed, a mutiny on the Somersand was thus responsible for the court-martial and hanging of three men. Brother Tom, Captain of the Meteor, we can likewise follow (though Mr. Leyda wishes there were more to tell of him) and we are grateful for these new glimpses of him, because he was Herman’s favorite brother. The picture of Hawthorne’s friendship for Melville comes more clearly into focus as we watch him quietly and persistently trying to find a consular post for his friend of the Lenox-Pittsfield days. There is much that is new about Melville’s second son Stanwix, and what is new is to the credit of this unfortunate, brave boy, so perplexing to his parents but dear to them and equally so to his relatives, who secretly sent him money in his most desperate need. 

Most heart-warming of all the entries in the “Log” are the new words we have from the noble ones, the ones who were newest devoted to Melville in and out of fortune. First of these is his wonde1ful father-in-law. In all the delicate financial arrangements by which Judge Shaw attempted to make things easier for Herman and Lizzie he never wrote an untactful word which might hurt his son-in-law’s sensitive pride. In this company, too, is Cousin Catherine Gansevoort Lansing of Albany, giving quietly and tactfully,  too, a great lady and a great woman. With them is John C. Hoadley, Melville’s brother-in-law, and the one in the family, it would appear, who had the greatest faith in his genius. Withhim, and possibly with him alone, in these last years, did Melville let down his guard and reveal his heart.

Mr. Leyda has employed many ingenious devices to enhance the usefulness of his “Log.” Especially illuminating are the sections in which he is able to juxtapose passages from the novels beside official records or other factual information and thus show us when Melville was reporting and when he was inventing, with only a hint or a kernel of fact to go on. Admirable, too, is the counterpointing of Melville comments on his reading against the record of fan1ily visits and mundane tasks. In the later years his inner life is to be deduced from these comments and underscorings in his books.

A word should be said about “The Melville Log” as a piece of bookmaking. The format enhances the clarity of the presentation of the facts. The facsin1iles of portions of letters and hand-written documents are clear and sharp and the numerous contemporary engravings and lithographs which enliven and illuminate the text are reproduced with fidelity. The make-up of the “Log” must have presented many problems to the printers and editors. One cannot imagine better solutions than those which they found.

Leon Howard’s “Herman Melville, A Biography” has a very close connection with the “Melville Log.” As he says in his Preface, Mr. Leyda proposed to him “a co-operative venture in which I should undertake a formal narrative biography while he pursued his original plan, each of us checking on the other, sharing such information as we could gather, and troubling one another with the problems that arose out of our different procedures.” In substance this plan was followed, and the biography which eventuated is a kind of “writing up” of the “Log.” It is the most minutely factual biography of Melville to date and as such must be relied on hereafter by all who wish to write interpretative studies.

Mr. Howard has little patience with recent Melville criticism, especially that of the psychoanalytical school. In the last pages of his biography, mentioning no names but makingtransparent allusions,  he is pretty severe with much of the writing  about   Melville of the past twenty years. His own work, deliberately it would seem, eschews criticism.  The pages devoted to “Moby-Dick,” for example, deal almost entirely with the books which went into the making of it, the influences, literary and personal, to be found in it, and its relationship with the romantic tradition in literature. Whenever Mr. Howard halts his narrative flow, he seems almost to be digressing in order to comment on Melville’s mental state at the moment. This fidelity to fact gives Mr. Howard’s biography, in its total   effect, a curious cast. Melville emerges a very busy man, travelling about the world, visiting friends and relatives, entertaining and being entertained-and occasionally stopping to write a book.

William H. Gilman’s “Melville’s Early Life and  ‘Red­ burn’ ” is an old-fashioned   biography-in the sense that it is a detailed and fully documented work which mixes fact with criticism. Earlier Melville biographers passed over his youthful years with a lightness of hand that bordered on glibness. The materials in the Gansevoort-Lansing Collection of the New York Public Library could be drawn on for a fair picture of the Melville family when Herman was a small boy, though since he was not the darling of his parents as young Gansevoort was, precious little first-hand information about him was to be found there.

But the Albany and Lansingburgh years were obscure. Just how did the widow Melville manage? In what manner did she live after her husband’s bankruptcy and death? What were the influences which formed Herman’s adolescence and young manhood?  Part of the difficulty was that the chronology could not be made to come out right. Mr. Gilman was started on his fruitful quest by his discovery that Herman’s first going to sea, on the Liverpool trip, occurred in 1839, not, as had earlier been supposed, in 1837. Much of importance followed from this correction; for one thing, thediscovery of the actual ship, the St.Lawrence,on which Melville sailed. This fact, in turn, led to significant background information about the autobiographical passages in “Red­ burn,” the novel which Melville in 1849 built around the memories of his trip to Liverpool.

Mr. Gilman has probably told us all that we shall ever learn about the young Melville. We now know that not much was expected of him.  The family believed that he might, perhaps, be moderately successful in commerce, for he showed some aptitude at figures and in practical subjects like surveying and engineering.  Because, in MR. Gilman’s early pages, the young Melville seems to be waiting in the next room and is so seldom in the front parlor with the rest of the family, one is all the more pleased when he begins to speak up for himself at the Philo Logos Society and when he finds a young sweetheart, Mary Parmelee, with whom he can walk beside the sparkling Hudson and to whom he can read the sweet poems of Tennyson. The youth of nineteen who sailed for Liverpool in 1839 was a person, but no one knew him as well then as we do now. 

These three books mark a new stage in Melville scholar­ ship and criticism. Hereafter the exegetes will be wise to anchor their studies in these abundant pages.  Not to do so will be perilous. But one doubts if the quest is even yet concluded. At the end of his work Mr. Leyda, the keenest hunter among all Melvillians, appends three pages of apology, which he calls “The Endless Study.” In this he urges others to search for more clues in tangential archives and among branches of the family tree where he did not have time to look. My word of advice to those who follow the trail to which he points is this:  Jay Leyda  will have found  the missing document  before you can blunder  your way to it.

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