From the Rockwell Kent illustrations    

        In the chapter titled, “The Spirit Spout,” Ishmael observes in Ahab’s face “that in him also two different things were warring.  While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap.  On life and death this old man walked” (200).  Melville too seemed to suffer from a similar paradoxical state of life and death.  In a letter to fellow author and friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville wrote, “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay.  Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot” (Letters 128).  He wrote these words in 1851 at a critical juncture in his life and career, working diligently to finish his whaling novel, Moby-Dick, or The Whale. 

        In many ways Moby-Dick is the pinnacle of Melville’s writing and thoughts, the accumulation of his knowledge of the past, present, and, in some ways, of the future of man’s struggle to find his place in the world.  Ahab’s need to conquer the white whale can be perceived as a struggle against God, nature, or one’s self, and though the monomaniacal captain is ultimately brought down, his defiance of such a powerful force as Moby Dick solicits both Faustian tragic and Romantically heroic readings of Ahab, much like Milton’s fallen angel from Paradise Lost, Satan, who has also been viewed as both an evil entity and tragic hero.  As a young man, Melville had to deal with  perplexing questions of life, death, affluence, poverty, greatness and mediocrity, and he sought the answers to these questions through his writing.

        Herman Melville was born on August 1st, 1819 in New York City, the third child of Allan and Maria Melvill.  The spelling of the last name would be changed to Melvill(e) after the death of Herman’s father.  Brought up with notions of education, both academically and spiritually, Herman received schooling until the age of twelve, when the death of his father would force him to find work to help support the family.  Though Melville did not finish his schooling, he would continue his education at sea.

        In 1841, Herman Melville signed up for a whaling excursion aboard The Acushnet.  It is here that Melville would receive both the greatest and harshest lessons concerning the humanity and inhumanity of mankind.  He did not complete his contractual stay aboard the whaling ship, and, ultimately, in July of 1842, when the whaling ship was at port in Nukehiva, Melville deserted the ship along with another crewmember and descended into the valley of the cannibalistic Typee people (Melville Log 130).  This adventure, a mixture of both fact and fiction, would become Melville’s first novel, Typee.  The novel was very successful and brought some acclaim to the then young and unknown author.  Though the novel is not filled with the philosophy and rhetoric of Melville’s later novels, one can see the beginnings of a mind bifurcated between what is and what could have been.  Typee in some respects can be seen as a novel about the fall of humanity.  Melville describes the island in Eden-like terms, and the people in a pre-lapsarian state of living, virtually untouched by Western technology and hypocrisy; however, Melville reminds us that all humanity can and will fall from grace.  Despite these moments of paradise, Melville flees from the villagers, fearing that he may be more of a prisoner than a guest. 

        Typee would lay the groundwork for future novels, each one becoming more and more laden with heavy philosophical questions.  Critics and audiences, however, did not want to read about notions of predestination and dark truths from the adventure novelist Herman Melville.  Moby-Dick did not receive the acclaim Melville had thought it would, and by the end of his career, he had lost much of his stature as an author of American adventures.  Melville earned some money by publishing short stories such as “Benito Cereno” and “Bartleby, the Scrivener” in the literary magazine, Putnam’s Monthly, and towards the end of his life, he began writing poetry, which is often regarded as tragically inferior to his abilities as a novelist.  Melville’s final novel, a short work titled Billy Budd, was published posthumously in 1924. 

       Herman Melville passed away on September 28th, 1891.  By the time of his death, Melville's name had become little more than an allusion.  The day after his death, an article in the press wrote of Melville's death, "There died yesterday at his quiet home in this city a man who, although he had done almost no literary work during the past sixteen years, was once one of the most popular writers in the United States" (Melville Log 836).  A similar article in the New-York Daily Tribune stated, "Herman Melville, formerly a well-known author, died at his residence..." (837).  Though Melville received some praise in his lifetime, mostly from his earlier novels, the Melville revival, which took place in the early twentieth century, would help lift the American author amongst the ranks of the literary elite, where he belongs.  Herman Melville continues to be an author widely read and interpreted for both his aesthetical and critical appeal, and he continues to be a pioneer in the shaping of American literature.   

                                                                                                                                                     -Written by Joseph M Meyer

 

Works Cited

Leyda, Jay, ed. The Melville Log. 2 vols. New York: Gordian Press, 1969.

Melville, Herman. The Letters of Herman Melville. Ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960.  

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick.  Ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. New York: WW Norton & Company, 1967.