Herman Melville, American Failure

Having recently finished a really good biography of Melville by Andrew DeBlanco, I've come to a place of extreme respect for the man. My own affection for the subject notwithstanding, DeBlanco is an able biographer and keeps the pages turning; I'd suggest reading the book - Melville, His World and Work - if you have even a passing interest in literary history. The fact that Melville and his era represent such a fascinating set of subjects just makes the book more enjoyable, and one gets the sense, reading DeBlanco's prose, that the biographer is having just as much fun as the reader.

This might seem cruel at first, considering that, more than anything else, Melville's life is a portrait of failure. From a series of early, moderate successes - a series of South Sea adventure stories, the most notable being Typee - his career abruptly descended into a protracted bout of frustration, critical misunderstanding, and popular disinterest that would last the rest of his life. His publishers were confused about his inability to produce what the public expected of him, breezy sea stories with more than a hint of the erotic, and his insistence on handing over what they saw as unwieldy allegorical novels. His closest friend, Hawthorne, ended up essentially giving up on him as a gloomy bastard. By the end of his life he was working as a customs agent and producing page after page of gloomy poetry with strict, clumsy rhyme schemes.

Most people like to focus on the adoration Melville has recieved since his death, as if to say that good writing gets its due, that true genius is usually recognized. The picture one usually gets of Melville is of a person transcending earthly shortcomings to reach a sort of heavenly literary afterlife, with a sly little observation here and there about American geniuses being more than a little neglected in our notoriously anti-intellectual culture.

What I find fascinating about Melville, though, isn't so much the transcendence of failure but the failure itself, exemplified by the evolution of Moby-Dick, which a lot of people have read and many more people have heard of and silently decided to avoid. (It's really good, by the way, and livelier than you might expect.)

What DeBlanco explains quite well in his illuminating sections about Melville's masterpiece is that Moby-Dick started out as the kind of adventure story both his publishers and the reading public expected from him. One can even tell, from the cartoonish beginning of the novel, with Quequeg and Ishmael sharing a bed and a pipe, and the tongue-in-cheek descriptions of taverns constructed from whale skeletons. The pursuit of whales on the high seas, all swashbuckling and derring-do. Melville had, in fact, almost finished a complete draft of Moby-Dick in this style when something altogether unexpected happened.

Melville decided, all of a sudden, to become an absolutely amazing writer. Whether it was because he was tired of being dismissed as a light novelist of adventure stories, or whether he was reading both Shakespeare and his buddy Hawthorne's wildly inventive short stories, it's not for me or DeBlanco to say. Regardless of his motivation, he went ahead and ripped apart the draft he had created and began wildly experimenting. He inserted dramatic monologues, bits of group narration, and fictional devices that wouldn't be widely used for decades to come. He drafted an absolutely nutso preface by a sub-sub-librarian. He inserted long, only tenuously connected riffs on the habits and lives of whales. And in the process he wrote one of the strangest and most experimental pieces of work ever to be accepted fully into the American literary canon.

And, in response, both critics and readers totally spurned him. Moby-Dick was a huge financial disaster for Melville; readership flagged, and critical praise was scant. One could argue that Melville, in re-writing Moby-Dick, had gambled with writing a great novel that could also sell, and that his gamble failed.

I would argue that Melville knew that the gamble wouldn't succeed.

Anybody who's read Moby-Dick can tell you that it reads like no other book published in the nineteenth century. At turns comic, tragic, ironic, and totally earnest, it switches perspectives, tones, and forms at the drop of a hat. It's often hard to follow, even for a twentieth century reader trained on college-level modernism; one shudders to think how a reading public that still expected relatively straight-forward narrative form would have recieved it. (On second thought, perhaps things haven't changed that much.)

I find it hard to believe that Melville, who was no dope when it came to understanding the world around him, wouldn't have realized how unlikely it would be for any large number of readers - or critics, for that matter - to appreciate such an essentially ludicrous book. I think he knew, going in, that savagely ripping apart his adventure story would seriously risk damaging his career. And he did it anyway, because he loved Shakespeare and Hawthorne, because he had something to say, or just because he felt like it.

That sort of literary courage is something we could use a little more of these days. Contemporary writers complain a lot about the narrow-mindedness of the American reading public, or about the low cultural capital of books. When Melville was writing, the market for American fiction was even leaner than it is now; almost everybody bought books by Brits instead. If he could risk everything he had to create a masterpiece in the middle of the nineteenth century, surely we can do the same in the early twenty-first, right?

Herman Melville: American Failure, American Badass. Sink your own life for the chance at greatness.