Herman Melville

319 Pages·1950·8.016 MB·English

by  Newton Arvin

“The wisest and most balanced single piece
of writing on Melville I have seen/'
—Atfied Kaztn
Herman
M ELVILLE
A CRITICAL KIOCRAHIY
NEW TON ARVIN
$ 1.85
Also by Newton Arvin
HAWTHORNE
WHITMAN
Edited by Newton Arvin
The Heart of Hawthorne’s Journals
Hawthorne’s Short Stories
Moby Dick
The Selected Letters of Henry Adams
Herm an
M elville
Newton Arvin
N EW YORK : T H E V IK IN G PRESS
CIRCULATION DEPARTSLNT
COPYRIGHT I950 BY WILLIAM SLOANE ASSOCIATES, INC.
COMPASS BOOKS EDITION 195 7
DISTRIBUTED IN CANADA BY
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED
To
David Lilienthal
This edition published by arrangement
with William Sloane Associates, Inc.
PRINTED IN U.S.A. BY THE COLONIAL PRESS INC.
Contents
Loomings..................................................................... 3
The Enviable Isles.........................................................37
The Author of Typee, Omoo, &c..................................77
New York and Pittsfield.....................................121
The Wh a l e .................................................................143
The Lee Sh o r e............................................................195
Perilous Outpost of the Sa n e ..................................217
Trophies of Pe a c e .......................................................253
Bibliographical No t e ..................................................301
In d ex ..............................................................................305
Acknowledgments
IN THE WRITING of this book I have incurred even
more obligations than one usually does in such cases. My
indebtedness to other writers, both critics and scholars, is
so heavy that I have long since ceased to be certain about all
of its items. The Bibliographical Note is an attempt to dis­
charge some of these, but it is a very incomplete one, and I
must hereby make general acknowledgment to two or three
score of writers about Melville, without whose work a book
of this sort could not be written.
Like everyone whose interest in Melville has carried him
very far, I am deeply indebted to Eleanor Melville Metcalf,
his granddaughter, whose kindness to me, as to so many others,
has been unlimited.
The heaviest of my obligations to other scholars is that to
Professor William H. Gilman, of the University of Rochester,
who has allowed me to make use of his unpublished doctoral
dissertation (Yale, 1947) on “Melville’s Early Life and Red-
burn” Mr. Gilman’s treatment of the subject is so painstak­
ing that it amounts to a rewriting of the early chapters of
Melville’s biography, and in giving an account of Melville’s
early years in Albany, in Lansingburgh, and on the St. Law­
rence, I could not have dispensed with his work. Mr. Gilman
now has a volume of his own in preparation, and when this
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A cknoucledgments
appears it will be evident how much I owe to his generosity.
Professor Harrison Hayford and Professor Merrell R. Davis
very kindly allowed me to make use of an unpublished article
by them on “Herman Melville as Office-Seeker,” which has
since appeared in the Modern Language Quarterly. Mr. Jay
Leyda has been unfailingly generous in giving me the benefit
of his inspired researches into Melville’s biography.
In writing of Melville’s life in the South Seas I have felt
myself on firmer ground than I should otherwise have done,
as a result not only of consulting the published writings of
Professor Ralph Linton, of Yale University, but of personal
talks with Professor Linton about Polynesian life and culture,
and particularly about the Marquesans, on whom he is our
leading authority.
Mrs. John Hall Wheelock has courteously permitted me to
quote from a manuscript essay (and probably an unpublished
one) by her father, Charles DeKay, on “The Birth of the
Authors’ Club.”
For permission to quote from unpublished letters and other
papers and to refer to annotations in Melville’s own books,
all at the Houghton Library, I am under obligation to the
Committee on Higher Degrees in the History of American
Civilization at Harvard University. Mr. Robert W. Hill,
Keeper of Manuscripts at the New York Public Library, has
been extremely helpful in allowing me to use the papers in
the Gansevoort-Lansing Collection there; and Mr. Paul North
Rice, Chief of the Reference Department at the same library,
has answered fully and patiently more than one question I
have put to him. I am also indebted for much valuable assist­
ance to Miss Margaret L. Johnson, Librarian of the Smith
College Library. Mr. F. B. Laughlin, Assistant Collector in
the Bureau of Customs, New York, has put me in his debt
by answering at length some of my queries to him.
To my colleague and friend, Professor Daniel Aaron, I
am particularly grateful for his patient reading of the whole
• vii •
A cknovoledgments
book in manuscript and for making many helpful suggestions.
I should perhaps say that this book ^was finished too early
for me to avail myself of either the information or the in­
sights in Professor Howard P. Vincent’s book on The Trying-
Out of Moby Dick or in Professor Richard Chase’s Herman
Melville.
vm
Herman M elv ille
Loomings
THE ECCENTRIC physician, Thomas Low Nichols,
once well known for his views on dietary reform and
hydrotherapy, dropped in, one day in the middle
’forties, at the Wall Street law-office of his young friends, the
brothers Gansevoort and Allan Melville. Gansevoort, the
elder of the two, had recently taken part on the Democratic
side in the campaign of 1844, and had just received his re­
ward for these services by being made secretary of the Ameri­
can legation in London. He was to be congratulated of course,
but Nichols felt, as Melville himself doubtless did, that he
was to be condoled with, too; he was a poor man, and his
salary at the legation would scarcely be enough to pay for his
gloves and his cab hire. They spoke of these gloomy matters,
and then a little later, when the subject had been changed,
the other Melville, Allan, remarked that the two of them had
a third brother, a brother whom Nichols had never seen. He
had been “a little wild,” said Allan, and while still hardly
more than a boy had run away to sea, sailing first to England
and then, after a year or so, joining the crew of a New Bed­
ford whaler and voyaging in the South Pacific. “He got home
a few months ago,” added Allan Melville, “and has been
writing something about his adventures among the cannibals.
Would you like to look at it?”
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