Robert Wernick - Herman Melville: The Man Who Created Moby Dick
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- Book:Herman Melville: The Man Who Created Moby Dick
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More and more readers and droves of scholars are turning to the pages of Moby Dick and other masterpieces by Herman Melville for an excursion into the world of the great American novel But in his lifetime New Englander Melville whose real-life adventures were the source for his spellbinding fiction found that adulation eluded him He had a bestseller in his first novel Typee at age 27 But by the time he was 30 in 1850 he was sitting at his desk in the Berkshires writing Moby Dick as a man possessed novel didnt attract a substantial readership and Melville lived out the rest of his days in obscurity His reputation began to be revived in the 1920s Today his audience is huge and interest in the life and times of an America icon is burgeoning Heres his life story briefly told by award-winning journalist Robert Wernick
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Herman Melville, after four years before the mast, came
ashore in New York fit and bronzed and handsome,
bubbling over with wonderful tales of what he had
done and seen, tales of typhoons and shipwrecks and
mutinies and great whales and cannibals in the South
Seas and beach-combers in Hawaii, of life in the fore
castles and in the rigging of whaling ships, merchant
ships, and warships of the United States Navy. The
tales enthralled his family and friends, and everyone
urged him to write them down. He sat down at a desk,
and, with the same energy he had used to scrub decks
and chase whales, he raced his pen over page after page
of paper to turn out, in a few weeks, a novel he called
Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life , a recollection of the time
he had jumped ship on the island of Nuku Hiva and
lived a while there with a native tribe and fell in love
with a beautiful maiden he called Fayaway. A lynx
eyed publisher snapped it up, and a few months later
it appeared in the bookstores, and Melville woke one
morning to find he was famous.
Typee had everything a book needed to be a bestseller
in 1846. It was an engaging narrative full of action in
the depth of seas, in jungles, the exotic charms of life
in a paradise as yet untouched by the new order then
being brought in by the gunships and missionaries of
the West.
More books followed Typee pell-mell: Omoo , another
Polynesian adventure story; Redburn , based on his first
sea voyage from New York to Liverpool; White Jacket ,
based on his voyage home on an American warship.
Readers could not get enough of them.
For all their high
spirits and breathless
pace, these were not
just the musings
of a man reliving a
colorful past. They
also contain precise
and angry accounts
of cruelty, oppres
sion, misery, and
crime on ships, on
Pacific beaches, in
the slums of Liv
erpool. The devil
may-care narrative
breaks repeatedly into speculations about the nature
of reality and of morality, which were to haunt all his
later writings, so much so that one of his biographers,
Lewis Mumford, saw nothing comic about including
Life, sinister meanings of, p. 124 among the entries in
his index. He was always a man subject to wide swings
of temper from brightness to gloom. From the age of
twelve, he was constantly fascinated and tormented by
the complexities and ambiguities of life.
He had been raised in a high-toned family striving
to live up to the standards of its noble ancestors: the
Melvills, who had been lairds in Scotland; and the
Gansevoorts, who had been Dutch patroons, owning
immense estates in the Hudson River Valley. One of
his grandfathers, Major Thomas Melvill, painted like
a Mohawk, had been a ringleader in the Boston Tea
Party, which was the first act of what was to become
the American Revolution. The other, General Peter
Gansevoort, had been the leader in the successful fight
to save Fort Stanwix, one of the victories that turned
the tide of the Revolutionary War.
The sheltered easy-going boyhood in upstate New
York came to an abrupt end when Melville was twelve.
His father went bankrupt and died psychotic, and
Herman and his older brother Gansevoort were thrust
into the big world to make their way as best they
could. Gansevoort - considered the bright hope of
the family - followed in his fathers footsteps, made a
mess of the family business and died young. Herman,
considered not smart, good enough perhaps to be a
clerk or a surveyor, failed in a variety of jobs and finally
in desperation signed on as a common seaman, as
lowly and demanding
and ill-paid a job
as you could
get, aboard
a passenger
ship sailing from
New York to
Liverpool. It
was a still more
desperate step
when a year
later he joined
the crew of a whaler.
Whaling ships went on voyages that might last for
months or years. Their crews were made up mostly
of rough, rowdy, desperate men - outcasts and crimi
nals, alcoholics and bums. On average, half of them
could be expected to desert on their voyage out, to be
replaced by drifters picked up on the beaches of the
South Seas.
But this boy had come through triumphantly. He
learned how to handle himself through all the storms,
the dangers, and the brutalities, and he became an
accomplished seaman, as handy at scrambling in the
rigging as in pulling an oar in the flimsy boats that
hunted down the whales.
And now he was cashing in on his success. By the
time he was thirty years old, he had five books behind
him, and sales were more than satisfactory.
Everything seemed to be going very well.
He was considered a luminary of American
letters. Crowds followed him when he
went striding, a regular matinee idol,
through the streets of Boston to go
courting the beautiful Elisabeth
Shaw, daughter of the chief jus
tice of Massachusetts. When
it came time for their
wedding, the location
had to be moved at the
last minute, because
it was feared that the
throngs of admir
ers more than a
century later they
would be called
groupies - might
disrupt the pro
ceedings
He went on to raise a batch of handsome, healthy
children on a farm he loved in the Berkshires, with a
mountain he loved looming over it. People who saw
him bounding on the rocks when he went on outings
with his literary friends must have thought that he
was on top of the world. And he must have felt on
top of the world when one day in 1850 he sat down to
pen the title of his new book, The Whale . It would be
printed under that title in England. It would be known
in the United States as Moby-Dick .
There were a couple of outside influences that would
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