Herman Melville E-Book

John Bryant

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 3030

Beschreibung

A comprehensive exploration of Melville's formative years, providing a new biographical foundation for today's generations of Melville readers Herman Melville: A Half Known Life, Volumes 1 and 2, follows Herman Melville's life from early childhood to his astonishing emergence as a bestselling novelist with the publication of Typee in 1846. These volumes comprise the first half of a comprehensive biography on Melville, grounded in archival research, new scholarship, and incisive critical readings. Author John Bryant, a distinguished Melville scholar, editor, critic, and educator, traces the events and experiences that shaped the many-stranded consciousness of one of literature's greatest writers. This in-depth and innovative biography covers Melville's family history and literary friendships, his father-longing, god-hunger, and search for the hidden nature of Being, the genesis of his liberal politics, his empathy for African Americans, Native Americans, Polynesians, South Americans, and immigrants. Original perspectives on Melville's earliest identities--orphaned son, sibling, farmer, teacher, debater, lover, actor, sailor--provide the context for Melville's evolution as a writer. The biography presents new information regarding Melville's reading, his early orations and acting experience, his life at sea and on the road, and the unsettling death of his older, rival brother from mercury poisoning. It provides insights on experiences such as Melville's trauma at the loss of his father, his learning to write amidst a coterie siblings, his struggles to find work during economic depression, his journey West, his life in whaling and in the navy, and his vagabondage in the South Pacific during the moment of American and European imperial incursions. A significant addition to Melville scholarship, this important biographical work: * Explores the nature and development of Melville's creative consciousness, through the lens of his revisions in manuscript and print * Assesses Melville's sexual growth and exploration of the spectrum of his masculinities * Highlights Melville's relevance in contemporary democratic society * Discusses Melville's blending of dark humor and tragedy in his unique version of the picturesque * Examines the 'replaying' of Melville's life traumas throughout his entire works, from Typee, Omoo, Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, Pierre, Israel Potter, and The Confidence-Man to his shorter works, including "Bartleby," his epic Clarel, his poetry, and his last novella Billy Budd * Covers such cultural and historical events as the American revolution of his grandparents, the whaling industry, New York slavery, street life and theater in Manhattan, the transatlantic slave trade, the Jacksonian economy, Indian removal, Pacific colonialism, and westward expansion Written in an engaging style for scholars and general readers alike, Herman Melville: A Half Known Life, Volumes 1 and 2 is an indispensable new source of information and insights for those interested in Melville, 19th-century and modern literature and culture, and readers of general American history and literary culture.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Volume I

Title Page

Copyright Page

Preface

Introduction

Island and Isolato

Water

Peering, Absorbing, Translating

Part I: Manhattan and Albany

(1819–1832)

1 Last Leaves, New Leaf

2 Commerce and Providence

3 Home and Street

Parenting

Greenwich Village Retreat

Theater and School

Theater and Race

Theater of the Street

4 Awakenings

Siblings

Middle Child

“I thought tht I coul‐d not write well enough”

Phantom of Life

5 The Secret of Our Paternity

Drowning Man

6 A Marriage of New England and New York

Allan and Maria

7 Recuperations

Bright Scholar

Brothers and Uncles

8 Schoolboy and Reader

Seeds of the Poet

9 The Birth of Ishmael

Part II: Growing Up Gansevoort

(1832–1836)

10 Patriarch and Hero

General Gansevoort

Upstate Brothers, Uncles, and Cousins

The Hero of Fort Stanwix

11 Gansevoort and the Indians

The Summer of Indian Removal

12 Broken Temple

13 Jackson and the Negro

Jackson's 1832

14 Albany and Africa

“From Hudson's stream to Niger's wave”

15 Black Gansevoort

Our Folks

Racial Chiaroscuro

16 Mourning and Arousal

“A scar that the air of Paradise might not erase”

Melville Nocturne

17 Summer of Plague

“In time of the cholera”

18 Spoils and Debt

19 Working Boy

One Night in a Bar‐Room

20 Moving Up

Uncle Peter

Independence and Readiness

Part III: Sibling Coterie

(1836)

21 Brother Gansevoort

The Business of Hats

Byron Boys

Religion and Politics

22 Happiness and Power

The Example of John Bleecker Van Schaick

Power

23 Sister Helen

Sparring Sister

Fanny Kemble Comes to Albany

24 “Emancipated school‐girl”

A Hive of Sedgwicks

A School for Young Ladies

The Example of Kemble

The Loneliness of a Berkshire Fall

25 Sister Augusta

Pattern Girl

Augusta's Compositions

The Example of Felicia Hemans

26 Dark‐Eyed Darling

Writing and Grief

Revision and Identity

27 Composing Yourself

Research and Misdemeanor

“Scripture otherwise obscure”

Part IV: Inland Identities: Farmer, Teacher, Debater, Lover, Actor, Writer

(1836–1839)

28 “Deep inland there I”

Fairyland and Panic

Panic in Fairyland

Departures

29 Uncle Thomas

Country Cosmopolite

Farmhand

Camel Among Cattle

30 Schoolmaster

Cousin Robert

“Quite a savage”

District School

Schoolyard and Manhood

31 Debater and Cosmopolite

The Grand Philologian Debate: Round 1 (1837)

Cosmopolite of “No Fixed Principles”

The Grand Philologian Debate: Round 2 (1838)

32 Lansingburgh

Family Business

33 The Intimacy of Reading

Dr. Todd's

Index Rerum

Reading and Transformation

Reading for Oratory and Health

34 “Occasional writting & reading”

“Uncritical Days”

Melvillean and Cooperesque

Uncle John

“The Conceit of Skin”

Cabin Boys

35 “Love is then our Duty”

Reveries of One Degree, or Another

Courting

Herman Treads the Boards

36 Published Writer

First Fragment

Second Fragment

Escape

Part V: The Imperative of Travel

(1839)

37 “On the go‐off”

The Imperative of Travel

Uncertain Change

38 Circumambulating the City

39 “Sort of a looking sailor”

40 A Brotherhood of Outcasts

Unforced Errors

An Apology for Adolescence

The Pawnbroker

The Negro

41 Secret Sympathy

Ship of Glass

Black Goat

Part VI: First Voyage

(1839)

42 Along the Marge

43 His First Crew

Night Watch

44 Learning the Ropes

“A great many names”

“A wonderful thing in me”

“No school like a ship”

45 “No school like a ship for studying human nature”

The Secret Thoughts of Men

46 Irish Sea and Liverpool

Very New Yorkish Liverpool

On the River Mersey

Part VII: Liverpool and Back

(1839–1840)

47 The Liverpool of His Father

Lonely Satisfactions

Melville's Montage and the Lord Nelson Monument

48 Roscoe and

The Picture of Liverpool

Triangular Trade and Tour Guide

Subversive Sculpture

Mixing Races in New York and Liverpool

Versions of R*s*o*

49 What Melville Saw in Liverpool

The Melville Gaze and the Moment of Liverpool

Prostitutes, Preachers, and the Poor

50 The Moment of Liverpool

The Rights of Man

A Trip to London?

A Day in the Country

51 Home Again; Teacher Again

Death Craft

Teaching School

52 Rent

Rent Wars

53 Maria's Boys

The Sergeant

Eli James Murdoch Fly

Tawney

Rival Gans

Mama

Volume II

Title Page

Copyright Page

Part VIII: Out West

(1840)

54 On the Road

55 On the Canal

56 Up in Michigan

57 Chicago and Galena

58 Versions of Prairie

59 “The Falls of St: Anthony”

60 Lonely Watcher

Remnant of Indians

The Fever of Advance

61 Rivers and Scars

Scarred Texts

The Uses of Mississippi

The Uses of Ohio

Part IX: The Atlantic

(1841)

62 Four Weeks' Residence Among the Natives of the Island of Manhattan

A Bohemia of One's Own

A Manhattan Reading List

63 Mean Streets

64 New Bedford

Tracing Frederick Douglass

Cotton and Whales

“Who ain't a slave?”

65 Ready for Sea

Choosing a Ship

66 Ship, Space, and Crew

Work, Word, and Line

The Crew

67 First Lowering

The Logic of Cannibalism

The Bahama Banks

Sighting and Starting: Stubb

Balancing Acts: Daggoo and Flask

“Start her, start her”: Revolution and the Hunt

Unrecorded Accidents

68 Unimaginable Accidents

Line and Leap: Ahab, Ishmael, Pip

Other Beings than Man

69 “Tornadoed Atlantic of my being”

Brazil

Rio de Janeiro

The Aurality of Slavery

Part X: The Pacific

(1841–1842)

70 “My dear Pacific”

Spheres of Fright

Spheres of Love

71 Work and Love

“An affair of oil”

72 “This thing of the

Essex

”

Shipwreck and Memory

“Dreaded Cannibals”

Who Is Not a Cannibal?

73 Forecastle Conversation

Telling Tales

Tattoo Narratives

Miracle of Art

74 Lover of the Picturesque

Queer Emotion

Moonlight and the Picturesque

75 Versions of Picturesque

Two Sides to a Tortoise

Part XI: The Marquesas

(1842)

76 Nuku Hiva

Taking the Marquesas

Le Drapeau Tricolore

Civilized and Savage: Taio'a and Tior

77 Jumping Ship

Strategies of Escape

Unmanned by Horrid Night

Land into Landscape

78 Island Masculinities

First Encounters

Perfidious Toby

Erasing Toby

79 Taipi and

Typee

Transcribing Taipi

Transforming

Typee

Fayaway's Gaze

80 Escaping Paradise

Melville on Fire

Melville on the Beach

Part XII: Tahiti, Eimeo, Hawai'i

(1842–1843)

81 Good and Faithful Seaman

Mutiny on the

Lucy Ann

: Part First

Renegades, Castaways, and Coincidence

82 Reluctant Mutineer

What Happened to Tahiti

Mutiny on the

Lucy Ann

: Part Second

Bembo's Rage

83 Resistance and Vulnerability

Bartleby the Sailor

Herman the Scrivener

Hotel de Calabooza

84 Comic Consciousness

Getting a Sense of Humor

Eccentrics and “Idle Rascals”

Humor, Sex, and Church

85 “Tahiti As It Is”

Commerce, Sex, and Death

Beachcombers and Other Bipeds

“Cunning use of the pen”

Farce in Paradise

86 Cosmopolitan Polynesia

Holding Court in Polynesia

87 “Not until Honolulu was I aware”

Lahaina

Honolulu

Missionary Monarchy and a Missionary Spouse

88 Colonial Consciousness

Colonial Confrères

Restoration and Saturnalia

Part XIII: In the Navy

(1843–1844)

89 Herman Melville O.S.

Life in a Man‐of‐War

Universal Absorber

90 Ordinary Seamen

Sea‐Brothers, USN

Jack Chase and Peru

Oliver Russ and Lima

91 Miracle of Art

GWW at the Golden Inn

William Henry Meyers and Corruption

Lemsford the Poet

An Eager Auditory

92 Tearless in Lima

The Whiteness and Woe of Lima

93 Humiliation and Riot

Two Cousins, One Button

Stage‐Struck Sailor

94 Theater of War

Almost Flogged

Tawney

Part XIV: Sailor Come Home

(1844–1845)

95 Beloved Brother

Accidental America 1840–1844

Family News

“Three cheers for Melville!”

Stump Performance

Boston Then Home

96 Tableaux Vivants

Once and Future Families

Helen and Elizabeth Shaw

Boston Theatricals

97 First Unfoldings

Genesis

The

Typee

Manuscript

Part XV: Writing Typee

(1845–1846)

98 Tinker, Alter, Erupt

Tinkering: Buildings, Leg, and Road

Altering: Melville's Arrested Romance

Lake Fayaway

A Most Accomplished Orator

99 The Language of My Companion

Transforming Toby

Kory‐Kory and the Problem of Brothers

Familiar Families

Mother and Money

100 Translating Taipi

Translating Taipi: Literally or Liberally

Touching Whiteness

Eradicating Savages

101 Melville in Eruption

Versions of Stewart

102 Smuggling Verbalist

Versions of Porter

Snake‐Less in Paradise

Amiable Epicures

The Porter Paradox

Part XVI: “Practised Writer”

(1846)

103 Brothers Together

Gansevoort in Revision

Summer of Rejection and Revision

Literary Agent and “Practised Writer”

Reading Proof

104 Broken Sword

Love and Copyright

“The Blade Is Broken”

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 1

Figure 1.1 Allan Melvill's wholesale French finery shop sign.

Figure 1.2 Melville's paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melvill, Oil portra...

Chapter 2

Figure 2.1 Melville's father, Allan Melvill. Watercolor by John Rubens Smith...

Chapter 3

Figure 3.1 Dancing for eels at Catharine Market. In this engraving of a scen...

Chapter 4

Figure 4.1 Herman's first letter, to Aunt Lucy Melvill, October 1828.

Chapter 6

Figure 6.1 Melville's mother, Maria Gansevoort Melvill. Oil portrait by Ezra...

Figure 6.2 Melville's father, Allan Melvill. Oil portrait by Ezra Ames, ca. ...

Chapter 10

Figure 10.1 Melville's maternal grandfather, General Peter Gansevoort. Engra...

Figure 10.2 Melville's uncle, Peter Gansevoort. Photograph, ca. 1850s.

Chapter 11

Figure 11.1 Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant). Portrait by George Romney, 1776....

Chapter 19

Figure 19.1 Mohawk and Hudson Railroad. Late nineteenth‐century woodcut of A...

Chapter 21

Figure 21.1 Melville's oldest brother, Gansevoort Melville. Drawing ca. 1846...

Chapter 23

Figure 23.1 Melville's oldest sister, Helen Melville Griggs. Photograph ca. ...

Chapter 24

Figure 24.1 Actress Fanny Kemble. Watercolor by Henry Brintnell Bounetheau, ...

Chapter 25

Figure 25.1 Melville's younger sister, Augusta Melville. Photograph ca. 1855...

Chapter 29

Figure 29.1 Melville's uncle, Thomas Melvill, Jr. Reproduction of an oil por...

Chapter 32

Figure 32.1 Environs of Albany. Inset in Samuel Augustus Mitchell's

Map of t

...

Figure 32.2 Melville House, Lansingburgh. Pen drawing and watercolor by Fran...

Chapter 35

Figure 35.1 “Over the Hills and Far Away.” Excerpt from John Gay's

The Begga

...

Chapter 38

Figure 38.1

New York 1839

. Map by Thomas Bradford.

Chapter 39

Figure 39.1 Liverpool packet ship

Yorkshire

, ca. 1840. Comparable in size an...

Chapter 46

Figure 46.1

Liverpool Dock and Church

. Engraving, ca 1840.

Chapter 47

Figure 47.1 Lord Nelson Memorial Monument, Liverpool.

Chapter 48

Figure 48.1 William Roscoe. Oil portrait by William Archer Shee, 1815–17....

Chapter 53

Figure 53.1 Gansevoort Melville’s office sign. Reproduced with the permissio...

Chapter 66

Figure 66.1 Whaleship

Charles W. Morgan

, under sail in 1920; a sister ship t...

Chapter 67

Figure 67.1

Whaling: The Spermaceti Whale

. 1840 engraving.

Chapter 76

Figure 76.1 Map of Nuku Hiva. The Hakaui, Nuku Hiva, and Comptroller Bays ar...

Chapter 77

Figure 77.1 Cascades in the Nuku Hiva interior, resembling Melville's descri...

Chapter 80

Figure 80.1 Richard Tobias Greene. Daguerreotype, 1846.

Chapter 82

Figure 82.1 Dupetit Thouars taking over Tahiti on 9 September 1842. Engravin...

Chapter 87

Figure 87.1 Map of Honolulu, 1843. Isaac Montgomery's store is in lower‐left...

Chapter 89

Figure 89.1 US Frigate

United States

. 1851 engraving from a drawing by Maste...

Chapter 95

Figure 95.1 Melville's younger brother Allan Melville, Jr. Daguerreotype, 18...

Chapter 96

Figure 96.1 Elizabeth Shaw Melville. Daguerreotype, 1847.

Chapter 103

Figure 103.1

Typee

manuscript leaf 16 recto, p. 31. Gansevoort's swirling pe...

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

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Volume I

Herman Melville

A Half Known Life

John Bryant

Volume I

Eternal Ifs: Infant, Boy, and Man(1819–1840)

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data

Names: Bryant, John, 1949– author.Title: Herman Melville: a half known life / John L. Bryant.Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley‐Blackwell, [2020] | This resource is a multipart monograph with two volumes. | Contents: A half known life – The biography of a half known life.Identifiers: LCCN 2020016327 (print) | LCCN 2020016328 (ebook) | ISBN 9781405121903 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119072690 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119106005 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Melville, Herman, 1819–1891. | Novelists, American–19th century–Biography.Classification: LCC PS2386 .B79 2020 (print) | LCC PS2386 (ebook) | DDC 813/.3–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016327LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016328

Cover Design: WileyCover Images: © portrait of Herman Melville © Anita Impagliazzo, charcoal portrait after oil portrait by Asa Twitchell, Liverpool from the Sea © duncan1890/Getty Images, Letter of Herman Melville 1828, The Osborne Collection of Herman Melville Materials, Special Collections, Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas

For Virginia Blanford

Preface

Biography is impossible, it is said. If we cannot fully “know” ourselves or our contemporaries, how can we possibly know the life of someone born 200 years ago? I never sat with Herman Melville, never observed his daily quirks, his manner of speaking, dressing, moving about the house. I've not observed his moods around strangers, shipmates, editors, friends, or family. All I really know of him are his writings, mostly prose fictions, many poems, a couple essays and reviews, and lamentably few letters. Like several worthy predecessors, this biography is a narrative of the known facts of Melville's childhood, adolescence, young manhood, maturity, and old age. But narratives are notoriously subjective and speculative. Biography cannot give you The Life; it can only simulate a life, and what good is a simulation; thus, biography is said to be impossible.

Even so, biography is as inevitable as it is impossible; we desire it. But why? Aren't Typee, Moby‐Dick, “Bartleby,” and Billy Budd all that we need? Yet we want more as we read perhaps because Melville's works – many of them auto‐fictions – have the urgency of self‐exploration. We seek a connection between his writing and his life as if his creative process and his life experiences were linked versions of the same thing. We want to know how this remarkable writer survived the accidents in his life (some tragic) and the traumas of his everyday living (in adolescence and mid‐life); how he absorbed the world around him (white and black; male, female, and other; material and immaterial); how he learned to translate himself into his writings. I cannot claim that my biography – or any biography – can give you a full knowing of a writer's life. We might, however, try different ways of “half knowing” Melville.

The subtitle of this biography– “A Half Known Life” – comes from a passage in Moby‐Dick that equates the human soul with an “insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy” that is surrounded by “all the horrors of the half known life.” We cannot know peace and joy, Melville suggests, without knowing horror, nor horror without peace and joy. It is a world of interdependencies. The “half known” horrors in our lives are public and private. Social structures, whose power strings are pulled by seemingly invisible agents, have given us slavery, Indian removal, species extinction, urban poverty, alienation, and war. But our private horrors seem utterly adventitious and accidental: the loss of a father and of a son, battles with whales, the threat of the cannibal, or the anxieties of variable sexualities. Melville's life also suggests to us that certain quirks of thought and strange emotions, certain shocks of recognition penetrating our very being, and a certain gift for language enabled him to write out and through these public and private horrors. What draws us to Melville, and draws me to the impossible art of biography, is that while we cannot know this writer fully, we can know his writings, and knowing how those writings work, in manuscript and in print, is an opening that exposes the unique imperative in him to write. If we can grasp at this fundamental dynamic in his life, we might in turn be able to read his writings in the context of his evolution as an artist.

One other impossibility. Herman Melville: A Half Known Life is a literary and “critical” biography, and yet, since the 1940s and the rise of the New Criticism the field of literary interpretation has held “biographical criticism” in low regard. In the view of many critics, biography is impossible because knowing the life does not help us read the writings. The assumption is that a novel or poem contains within it all the information we need in order to interpret it, and that Melville's intended meanings, his creative process, and revisions have no bearing on how we interpret the final, published work itself. While these assumptions are reasonable if we take literature to be simply an accumulation of publications, the broader view I adopt is that meaning derives from the sum of all writing, before, during, even after the publication of a writer's novel or poem. Rather than limiting our perspective to single published versions of a literary work, we need to read all versions of a writer's writing, including revisions of novels and poems in manuscript or adaptations created by writers other than Melville. If we want to experience this broader view of writing as the complicated phenomenon that it is, we need to bring the author as a writer back into our thinking about literature. We need reliable ways to think more critically about the interactions of private and social meanings that we might discover hiding out in a single author's creative process.

One constant in a writer's life is revision and replay. In Melville's manuscript revisions such as the erasure of words, characters, and arguments and his invention of new words or in his replaying of images within and throughout published works, we might find lurking the evidence of his discovery of a symbol or the evolution of his picturesque way of seeing and writing. In writing this life of a writer, I focus on the living that unfolds in the writing process itself: what Melville saw in his personal experience of the world around him and how he transformed it into words. The challenge is placing these microscopic moments of creativity in the larger macroscopic context of the writer's world: Melville's siblings who learned to write, too, and in writing alongside him influenced his language; the politics and economy of his life in upstate New York and Manhattan; his exposure to African Americans, who recur throughout his life as a writer; his working life as a farmer, whaler, and naval seaman, as a mutinous beachcomber and a customs inspector; his relation to men and to women; his need to “go off” and be away from home; his conflicting need for domesticity. Though the conclusion of this half known life may still be that we can only half know Melville, a half knowing is enough for us to know more about Melville than we had previously imagined.

One warning about Time, Place, and Name. These two volumes of my projected three‐volume biography cover Melville's early life, adolescence, and young manhood up to his first breakthrough as a writer with the publication of Typee. Since moments from Melville's early life crop up randomly throughout his lifetime of writing, extending from the 1846 of Typee to the 1891 of Billy Budd, this narrative necessarily jumps ahead in time, from the present of Melville's life experience, say as a boy named Herman in 1828, to the future of an artist named Melville writing Moby‐Dick in 1850, and back. To keep track during these moments of biographical time travel, I provide time stamps throughout the narrative to remind readers where they are in the chronology of the life. Similarly, the narrative may hop from place to place. For instance, in steaming up the Ohio River in 1840, Herman took a side trip to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, which Melville did not record in his journal until 1857 when he was touring the claustrophobic Pyramids of Egypt, and then Rome's Tiber River, which reminded him of the Ohio. The adjacency of place in Melville's mind hints at the half known adjacency of ideas in his thinking. Here, too, I provide place signatures to remind readers where they are on the map of Melville's consciousness. Finally, throughout these two volumes, I use “Herman” when I am speaking about the person as he is experiencing his life, and “Melville” to indicate the writer writing.

I started writing this biography in earnest in 2009, but the idea for the project began decades ago when I began to study, write about, and teach Melville at various venues in the US and abroad. From that earlier beginning, I have benefited from the works of several Melville biographers whom I never met – Charles Roberts Anderson, Newton Arvin, William Gilman, Howard Horsford, Leon Howard, Alice Kenney, Eleanor Melville Metcalf, and Raymond Weaver – and biographers I have met and greatly admired: Andrew Delbanco, Hershel Parker, and Laurie Robertson‐Lorant. Their different approaches and insights have been inspirational. Central to the work of any Melville biographer, researcher, and reader is Jay Leyda's Melville Log, a two‐volume chronology of Melville‐related events. In the mid‐1980s, Jay confided to me that his reason for consolidating the known facts of Melville's life was to provide scholars and critics with a communal foundation upon which they might construct their own biographies and biographical criticism. His assumption was that no single biography will ever be definitive and that each generation will create its own Melville biography – its own narrative of the facts – to reflect our collective and evolving sense of life, culture, and humanity. While I hope my contribution will be comprehensive in scope and accessible in style, I have no illusions that it is the final word on Melville's life but rather hope that it will induce others to write their own half known lives.

Another crucial resource for Melville research can be found in the historical and textual notes in each of the fourteen‐volume Northwestern‐Newberry editions in The Writings of Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. As he did for so many scholars, Hayford inspired me to see more concretely how biography and editing are fundamental to interpretation. In addition, Tanselle's critical editing and theorizing about editing, along with Jerome McGann's different but equally vital theories have shaped my own theorizing about editing what I call Melville's “fluid text”; both were also generous in reading chapters from this work in progress. Other scholars were early influences, and their insistence upon historicizing, either through research, editing, manuscript study, or critical analysis, have also shaped my thinking: Hennig Cohen, Robert C. Ryan, and Donald Yannella. Early mentors (including McGann) at the University of Chicago – David Bevington, Walter Blair, Hamlin Hill, Norman Maclean, James E. Miller, Jr., and William Veeder – instilled the not‐easily realized idea that good writing and critical thinking are inseparable. I am particularly grateful for Bevington's and Veeder's recent and careful readings of different portions of this biography.

Over the past decade, many experts have read all or substantial parts of Herman Melville: A Half Known Life. In particular, Wyn Kelley, Robert Milder, and Brian Yothers provided incisive and useful feedback, regarding fact, argument, and style. I am equally grateful to Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Dennis Berthold, John Gretchko, Samuel Otter, Elizabeth Schultz, Ralph Savarese, Haskell Springer, John Stauffer, and Robert Wallace. My efforts would have resulted in thin and erroneous gruel if not for their encouragements, conversations, corrections, and gracious suggestions. I am also indebted to those who have responded with insight and encouragement to individual chapters and this project in general: Jonathan Arac, Thomas Augst, Magdelena Azabache, Jennifer Baker, Dawn Coleman, Louis de Paor, Jane Desmond, Adam Fales, Meredith Farmer, Jamie Folsom, Christopher Freeburg, Jay Grossman, Pawel Jędrzejko, David Ketterer, Nick Laiacona, Robert Levine, Reagan Louie, Alma MacDougall, Sanford E. Marovitz, Timothy Marr, Katie McGettigan, Tony McGowan, Robert Milder, Christopher Ohge, Steven Olsen‐Smith, Peter Riley, Lance Schachterle, Chris Sten, Edward Sugden, and Marta Werner.

I would be remiss if I did not single out several of my many excellent Hofstra University colleagues whose works and interactions have stimulated me throughout my scholarly career and who shaped this work in more ways than they might imagine: Dana Brand, G. Thomas Couser, Joseph Fichtelberg, John Klaus, Ethna Lay, Alice Levine, Lisa Merrill, David Powell, Daniel Rubey, Craig Rustici, Adam Sills, Karyn Valerius, and Lee Zimmerman. My colleagues in Rome and Naples provided open arms, provocative insights into literature and teaching, and endless opportunities to share my ideas about Melville and biography internationally: Sara Antonelli, Pilar Martinez Benedi, Donatella Izzo, Giorgio Mariani, and Gordon Poole. For guidance in other lands and languages, I am also grateful to Basem Ra’ad for introducing me to Jerusalem and its environs, to Charlene Avallone and Chip Hughes in Hawai’i, to André Revel in Nuku Hiva, to numerous scholars in Japan, among them Arimichi Makino, Yukiko Oshima, Takayuki Tatsumi, and Tomoyuki Zettso, and to the late Jack Putnam, who showed me Melville’s Manhattan. Finally, among these many readers are those who have also been helpful sounding boards in ongoing debates about the art of biography and Melville biography: Jaime Campomar, T. Walter Herbert, John Matteson, John Rocco, Carl Rollyson, Kenneth Silverman, and John Wenke.

The librarian is every biographer's best friend, and I have benefited enormously from the guidance of many, among them William Kelly, Matthew Knudsen, Thomas Lannon, Meredith Mann, and John Cordevez at the New York Public Library; Warren Broderick of the New York State Library; Leslie Morris and Dennis Marnon at Houghton Library; Alex Reczkowski and Kathleen Reilly at Berkshire Athenaeum; Betsy Sherman at Arrowhead; Katherine Chansky at Schenectady Historical Society; Will Hansen at The Newberry Library; Michael Dyer at Mystic Seaport Museum; and Ann Grafstein at Hofstra’s Axxin Library.

I would also like to thank the extraordinarily gifted editorial and production staff at Wiley who have patiently and generously squired this project – a proposed ten‐chapter book that grew ten‐fold over ten years – into print. They are editors Andrew McNeillie, Emma Bennett, Rebecca Harkin, and Nicole Allen; copyeditor Tiffany Taylor; and those in production: Mohan Jayachandran, Sarah Peters, and Shyamala Venkateswaran. Independently, my good friend Carol Holmes Alpern volunteered to assist in proofreading.

I am no less grateful to friends and family who have lent their eye and expertise to these pages. In particular, I wish to thank five college friends, who have also read portions of these pages; they inspire me to take flight and keep me grounded: Paul Harder, William Hogle, Bernard Sawyer, Philip Russ, and Patrick White. My sister Paula Bonilla and my immediate family – Emma Coate and Eliza Harless Bryant and their spouses Russell Coate and Jessica Harless in Chicago, and Liana Bryant in New York, along with my grandchildren John and Margot Coate and Frances Harless Bryant – have been a constant blessing for their loving support during these many years of research and writing, and for their guidance, friendship, and games: a vital reminder that I live in the twenty‐first century, not the nineteenth. My deepest and forever thanks go to Virginia Blanford whose talents, wit, feeling, judgment, friendship, and love have gone into her multiple readings of every word of this book and into every moment of my life. She has helped me make with her “one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy.”

Introduction

For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.

(Moby‐Dick, Ch. 58)

Island and Isolato

The city of New York sits where three land masses collide to form a broad bay. To the north and east is New England, with marshy inlets quickly giving way to rocky highlands and lofty mountain chains. To the east is Long Island, Walt Whitman's Paumanok, shaped like a fish: low‐lying, indifferent, unmovable, but a sandbar nevertheless and destined to erode beneath rising Atlantic tides. North and west is upstate New York, thrusting up from the hilly Bronx to the mountainous Catskills, extending along Washington Irving's “lordly Hudson,” past the river towns of Poughkeepsie, Albany, Troy, and Lansingburgh, toward the sharp‐peaked Adirondacks, the river's source. At the center of these converging masses, hanging off the mainland and into the broad bay, like the pendulous ear‐drop of an elegant lady or gay blade, immigrant worker, bowery b'hoy, or piratical entrepreneur, is Manhattan island, center of the world.

Or so it might seem: centers of the world come and go. In the blindingly quick 200 years during which it has achieved this distinction, Manhattan has grown from a clustering of villages and farms at the island's southern tip into a metropolis filling the entire island, and more. Once a colonial outpost, it is now a world capital for commerce, finance, and culture teetering on the precipice of consumer‐driven power. In 1811, forward‐looking city officials imposed on the virtually vacant island a grid of north–south avenues and east–west streets that regularized the variable topography of Manhattan. Though the streets would remain undeveloped for decades throughout the nineteenth century, uptown and downtown neighborhoods, East Side and West Side, had come into being. By 1825, the Erie Canal linked New York's port to the Great Lakes, thereby connecting the Old World across the Atlantic to America's fertile inland territories, making New York the nation's trade center, outstripping Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston. As the country spread west, Manhattan spread north beyond Wall Street and Greenwich Village into the empty grid of numbered avenues and streets; it eddied around the rocks and meadows of Central Park and surged up Broadway, engulfing Harlem. It grabbed the Bronx and stretched east over bridges to take Brooklyn and Queens. It spread west to Staten Island. It grew upward with arrogant, fragile skyscrapers of stone, steel, and glass, piercing improbable heights, tempting fate.

As industry and technology grew in the early nineteenth century, the island's homes – flickering at night with luminous candles made of high‐grade spermaceti extracted from whales – converted their lighting to kerosene, then gas, then Thomas Edison's electricity. Tunnels taller than houses, and stretching for miles, were dug to bring fresh mountain water to the masses of humanity otherwise decimated by repeated plagues of cholera. Tracks for trains above ground and then below were laid to get those people to work. Up until the early twentieth century, most Americans lived in villages and farms, but Manhattan – reckless juggernaut of urban futurity – was the symbol of their ambition to escape those villages and farms, or simply to escape. It represented their yearning to find themselves or rather a place to lose themselves and begin a new life. It would dedicate a statue to liberty.

Yet when the colonies fought for independence in 1776, New York harbored Tories who valued trade over independence and fought to remain loyal to Britain. Nor was African American emancipation deemed a moral necessity: Manhattan or the rest of New York State did not free its slaves until 1827, decades later than all other northern states except New Jersey. Throughout the turbulent 1830s, which brought slave rebellions in the South and a surge in the abolitionist movement up North, the city maintained economic links to the South and its problematic ally, England, playing both sides, making profits. Throughout the nineteenth century and in the shadows of its ever‐rising spires, Manhattan was the tenement home for successive waves of immigrants unparalleled in number and diversity by any other city in the world. Gangs of police, firemen, and militiamen rioted alongside gangs of the underprivileged for control of the streets. The city was and continues to be a scene of exploitation and corruption. Bright home of the free and the brave, its alleys also harbor the mangled and lonely, the angry and dispossessed, the wanderer, outcast, and isolato. Manhattan is after all an island.

Herman Melville, who invented the word isolato, rooted in the word island, to describe an array of alienated and baffled characters, male and female, in America's democracy and throughout the world, is known mostly for his novel about whales, or rather one white whale and the obsessive captain and crew who pursue it, set mostly at sea, mostly in the Indian and Pacific oceans, situated about as far from Manhattan as one can travel on this “terraqueous” globe. Yet the author of Moby‐Dick was born in Manhattan, lived for decades on that island, raised children there, and died there. Spilling out prose and poetry during a life that spans some of the most volatile decades of America's nineteenth century, he invented and reinvented himself as a person and artist. He was one who lost a father and then later a son, who chose obscurity over celebrity, who survived a failing marriage, and who experienced more doubt, pain, and joy than we can ever fully know. From the time he was eight, he wrote.

As a boy, bookish street kid, moody teen, young husband, aging inspector of customs, and retiree with a cane, Melville kenned America's inner life through Manhattan: its streets, parks, theaters, wharves, townhouses, offices, churches, and prison (ominously called the Tombs). Even in the years when he resided elsewhere – 8 years in or near Albany, 4 years at sea, and 13 years at Arrowhead, his inland farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts (not far from Albany) – he was never mentally or physically distant from Manhattan's island of growth and riot. It was the center of his world. Although his best‐known work – the book about The Whale – was written mostly at Arrowhead, it begins with a walking tour of the piers of lower Manhattan. And Melville's first and most exotic book, Typee, set in the South Pacific and about another kind of cannibal island altogether, includes glimpses of Broadway and visions of the “cold charities” of the overheated city. The second half of his intense psychological novel Pierre is set in the city, as is his most famous tale, “Bartleby: A Story of Wall Street.”

New York suffuses Melville's life, vision, and writing. And for good reason. If you were to place your hand on a sizable map of America's Northeast, with the butt of that hand on Manhattan and with your thumb and fingers radiating out to Staten Island and New Jersey to the west, Albany and Arrowhead to the north, and Boston and New Bedford to the east, you would grasp the sphere of virtually all of Melville's family, friends, and associates. He traveled this city‐centered world incessantly, on steamboats and packets, rattling trains and omnibuses, on stages and carriages, in the saddle and on foot, whatever conveyance was required to get him about town or out of town or back to town, to conduct business with publishing associates and to visit relatives and relatives of relatives, or to avoid them.

This image of the writer – rooted in a place – may not comport with our cherished myth of him as an adventurer and loser. We think of Herman Melville as a sailor, rover, neglected genius, and angry loner, like his most famous, tragic hero, Ahab. But most of his life was spent with mother, siblings, aunts, uncles, in‐laws, children, grandchildren, and wife surrounding him snugly or conversing in a room nearby. Or we like to associate Melville with another familiar isolato, the inscrutably depressed Bartleby, a mechanically efficient copyist of tedious legal documents, who one day stops working and instead of saying “NO! in thunder” like an Ahab or Melville's friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, says instead, comically and quite offhandedly that he “would prefer not” to copy anymore and then dispassionately starves himself to death. “Bartleby” remains one of the most startling of all urban stories, a depiction of homelessness and self‐destruction that corrodes the affable assurances of the American dream of freedom, progress, and success. In it are no whales.

But Melville was not the characters he invented, neither Ahab nor Bartleby, not even Ishmael. Although we cannot deny the anger and alienation in his own life, the passive resistance and quiet protest, or that he knew depression, and witnessed great loss and suicides in his family and at sea, he was more of a homebody than the obsessive and manic‐depressive that some imagine him to have been. He was happier than we want him to be, both despite and because of his family. He was “lucky” – to use his word extracted from The Confidence‐Man – because of a talent that never failed him, even if it finally failed to provide him a consistent livelihood. Because he always wrote, he survived.

For us, the less mythic, more realistic, and harder Melville to know is a half‐knowable person with an evolving consciousness who inhabited a layered personality. In a passage from “The Gilder” (Chapter 114) in Moby‐Dick that we will revisit in chapters to come, Melville figured human consciousness as a cycle of selves, from unconscious infancy, faithful boyhood, adolescent skepticism, and on to “the pondering repose of If” in our maturity; and yet there is no “unretracing progress” in this cycle. Maturity gives way to infancy, and we cycle through our sequential selves repeatedly: “we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally.”1 These cyclic selves are cumulative so that we are always what we are now and once were. If we are to capture Melville's extraordinary evolving consciousness – this ocean‐goer and city‐dweller, this son, brother, husband, and father, and this most gifted writer of tales, poems, and novels – we need to acknowledge his own sense of an evolving, growing self. And we must learn to ask some hard questions about his many aggregate selves. Chiefly: How did the shifting consciousness that came to write such diverse works as Typee, Moby‐Dick, “Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” and Billy Budd learn to change from one to the next and to manage his cumulative and sequential selves? How can biography help us track the life changes that shaped the mind that shaped the words? How was Melville's uncanny creativity his means of survival? And, more broadly, how can biography make us better, more critical readers, not only of Melville's writing, but of writing itself, of ourselves, of our own evolving cultures?

Melville's brief career as a professional novelist – it streaked like a meteor through roughly 10 antebellum years (1846–1857) with the rapid succession of 10 books – was as volatile as the unparalleled growth of New York and the nation. Retooling himself as a poet just before the American Civil War, he suffered the inevitable wages of the sin of poetry – that is, neglect – and after the war he gave up professional publishing to become a customs inspector on Manhattan's wharves just in time for a midlife crisis. Compounding the professional failure of the 1860s were crushing personal losses, including the suicide of his son Malcom. In his later years, with more death all around him, as he outlived children, close siblings, and mother, it is a wonder that he made it through a day of work, or simply a day, or through a page of writing. Yet he continued to write poetry, including his massive epic Clarel, and to conceive other volumes of poems about the sea, his European travels, and Berkshire reminiscences; about roses, politics, art, and sexuality; even about Rip Van Winkle, oddly enough. One of these poems – a dramatic monologue of a sailor about to be hanged for mutiny – required a little prose head note by way of introduction, but the head note grew into a little novel, Billy Budd; and, like Rip, Melville was resurrected from his 20‐year repose in poetry and returned to prose. He had re‐re‐invented himself, again. At his death, Billy Budd's unpolished manuscript was tucked away in his papers, not to be released for another 30 years, when, in the 1920s, readers “rediscovered” Melville. To date, that “Melville Revival” continues to grow.

Unlike other writers of his day and ours who have succumbed to everyday trauma, depression, alcohol, drugs, stove gas, or shotgun, Melville kept the “spheres of love and fright,” as he called them, somehow dynamically interdependent, or rather he repelled the gravitation of one or the other with a creative energy that enabled him to orbit both spheres: observe them, feel their pull, but not flare out in the friction of their atmospheres.