In 1846, Melville published his first book, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. He was accused of fabrication, but readers were won over by the idea of an earthly paradise absent of social ills and money but full of sensual delights and free, uncomplicated sex.
In May of that same year, Melville's older brother Gansevoort died. He was only thirty years old but had been acting deranged, possibly due to tubercular meningitis.
The day after Gansevoort's death, a war on Mexico, the first widely-protested war in America's history, was declared. The war was based on a fraudulent invasion the Polk administration designed to seize land that Mexico was refusing to sell Texas. Melville viewed it as another ominous sign for America's future.
In 1847, Melville published another popular book entitled Omoo: A Narrative of Adventure in the South Seas. Despite the success of both Typee and Omoo, he was receiving little money from his writing and was concerned about the small percentage of profit that writers made from their work. He began to wonder if writing was more of a hobby-- an idealistic contribution to American culture-- than a paid profession.
In spite of his economic troubles and ambivalence toward marriage, Melville wed Elizabeth Shaw ("Lizzie") that same year and moved his entire family to New York City. Lizzie soon gave birth to a son, Malcolm.
In May of 1849, Melville, in the face of angry mobs, signed a petition supporting a British actor's right to play Macbeth even though his performance competed with that of an American actor who was an ardent nationalist.
Around this same period, Melville lost his gamble with a more serious novel entitled Mardi. Between 1832 and 1860, fiction audiences had become so fragmented that most authors had difficulty making a living. Although books considered "high" culture were attracting much smaller audiences than "low" culture books, Melville hoped to create works that appealed to both audiences. He felt, however, that he had been pigeonholed as a swarthy sailor, "the man who lived among cannibals." He was disgusted by the fact that what he considered a toss-off account of his 1839 voyage to Liverpool, Redburn, proved more popular with audiences than Mardi, the book he considered his breakthrough.
He set his next novel, White-Jacket, aboard a naval ship, exposing the racism and classism of the military.
In 1850, Melville developed an admiring friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, of whose work he had pseudonymously written, "I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul." He soon took out a loan to buy a farm in the Berkshires near Hawthorne.
With Lizzie expecting a second child, he continued to worry about money, even as he labored over his masterpiece, Moby Dick. Outdoor work on the farm helped to steady him emotionally, despite the pressure on his joints. He had a growing fear of failure. "Though I write the Gospels in this Century, I should die in the gutter," he told Hawthorne.
Melville finished writing Moby Dick in 1851 at the age of 32. He dedicated the book to Nathaniel Hawthorne, calling it a "token of my admiration for his genius." Besides realistic descriptions of whaling, the book combined elements of the following: American tall tales, Shakespearean and biblical allusions, bawdy humor, sailor yarns, Oriental mythology, philosophical meditations, visions of brotherly love, and existentialism. It is a portrayal of industrialization and imperialism as destructive and deadly. It was described by Melville as a "wicked" book, in that it poked fun at the sexual mores of Victorian America, as in the following passage: Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers hands in it; mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.
Conservative British and American reviewers did not like the book. The text of the English edition, furthermore, was badly butchered, with the Epilogue being dropped completely. Moby Dick made little sense without it. Although the book did get good notices, an extremely conservative critic for a London paper gave it a bad review that was widely circulated. Late reviews became nasty and personal, with one reviewer calling the book "a monstrous bore." Although it could have been a tremendous boost to the book's popularity, Hawthorne never wrote a public word about Moby Dick.
Overall, Melville made less off Moby Dick than for any of his previous works. He plunged into a depression, the strain of raising two children-- Malcolm and a second son, Stanwix-- driving a wedge between him and Lizzie. He became determined that his next novel would be a domestic best-seller.
Although intended as popular fiction, the book Pierre rapidly turned into a parody, as Melville seemed unable to restrain his satirical impulses. He added 150 pages to the end of the book that were a vicious attack on middle-class morality, the literary establishment, his family, and himself. Readers were turned off by the nihilism into which the hero descended, and the book became Melville's biggest failure, ruining his literary reputation. It instigated terrible reviews, including one with the headline HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY in the New York Day Book. Other reviews compared the degenerate tendencies of the narrative to "the peculiarities of Poe and Hawthorne," two authors who had been accused of succumbing to French influence. The book was not evaluated positively until a later era of Freud and Jung.
With Lizzie pregnant with a third child, Melville's family, again concerned with his mental health, tried to quell his writing. He was undeterred, however, and after the birth of his daughter Elizabeth, wrote "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" in installments for Putnam's magazine. The Wall Street portrayed in this story is a prison, with Bartleby's cubicle facing a blind wall; it is a world designed to keep workers subservient.
Melville generally disliked stories that portrayed the world as a coherent, just place. Two more of his magazine stories, "The Paradise of Bachelors" and "The Tartarus of Maids," explored the link between privilege and oppression. While a group of pampered bachelors live a life of ease in the first story, worn-out young women toil away in a paper factory in the second.
In February 1855, Melville became incapacitated by sciatica just as his fourth child, Frances, was born. Behind in his monthly mortgage payments, he decided he must sell the farm, plunging into another deep depression. His distressed mother tried to steer him away from writing and towards a political career but was unsuccessful.
During the same period, Melville wrote the story "Benito Cereno," in which a benignly racist captain mistakenly believes that he has stumbled across a ship of cooperative, well-behaved slaves, when in fact the Africans have seized control of the ship and slaughtered most of the whites. Interestingly, in May 1854, his father-in-law Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw had endured bitter scorn for returning a slave named Anthony Burns to the custody of his owner. Shaw's ruling in the case of "Roberts v. the Boston Public Schools," furthermore, paved the way for the Supreme Court's legalization of segregation in 1896. Melville's short story most likely served as an avenue of indirect confrontation with these actions.
During Melville's next bout of sciatica, he was prescribed a compound of chemicals whose side effects were likely worse than the disease itself. Despite these medical woes, he forged ahead with his writing, deciding that his next novel would satirize the "go-getter" spirit of the age. His publisher turned down the idea, instead publishing a collection of Melville's stories for Putman. The collection received good reviews but did not sell well.
Melville's next novel, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, was such a difficult read that failure to find an audience was all but guaranteed. It was likely inspired by popular newspaper stories of famous, slick opportunists and crooks. Commentators on these stories were quick to point out that the schemes of these operators were not all that different from the accepted dealings of wealthy businessmen and politicians. In The Confidence Man, virtuous appearances conceal ulterior motives, and all of the characters aboard the novel's Mississippi River Steamboat are simultaneously hunting after something and selling something. Human character is revealed as unscrupulous and unreliable, and the distinction between the legitimate and the criminal blurred. Melville had most likely absorbed the absurdities surrounding him, such as the fact that wealthy, churchgoing wives had begun to toil away at charities designed to relieve the very suffering that had been caused by the business practices of their husbands.
No comments:
Post a Comment