Is straight & rather handsome, his mouth expressive of sensibility & emotion,'' and so forth for half a page - and then he doubles the precision by telling us that Sophia's account ''is by all odds He quotes a precise description of Melville by Nathaniel Hawthorne's wife, Sophia - ''His nose Parker is a professor of English at the University of Delaware,Īnd his fanaticism for exactitude is such that he gives us not just the tiniest details, but the details about the details. The book is some 900 pages long, and even so counts merely as Volume 1, with Melville 32 years old at the end, fondling the first printed copies of ''Moby-Dick.'' Mr. Parker's ''Herman Melville'' is the grand culmination. During the last 75 years or so, armies of researchers have devoted themselves to digging up the necessary information and of those many decades of scholarly labor, Melville's personality was left to 20th-century scholars to solve. Kind of late-life lionizing that causes a great writer's admirers and friends to collect his letters and compose memoirs and generally to speculate about the real-life story behind the stories. But the subsequent books did less well, with the result that Melville never did go through the Parker tells us that ''Typee'' transformed Melville into America's first literary sex symbol, which is to say, sales were brisk. His own invented vocabulary, the language of an American Shakespeare, could evoke what he saw and felt. To ask what exactly was the origin of that irresistible urge to flight - the urge that, in Melville's youth, led him to ship out in real life, then led him, a few years later, into imaginary voyages so wild and exotic that only
Those early narrators were Melville's greatest creation - greater than Ahab, or the giant sea beast, or Captain Vere of ''Billy Budd.'' But because the narrators also seemed to be Melville's doubles, it has always been natural Most terrified intellectual in all of literature. Until the last and most eloquent of those six bookish gentlemen ended up bobbing in perfect isolation in the middle of the creamy ocean, gazing downward into the white depth of all existence, which is pure monstrousness - the loneliest,
Every one of the narrators appeared to be in flight from an unspoken past, and the flights themselves grew more desperate, Every one of Melville's first six books, from ''Typee'' to ''Moby-Dick,'' was written in the first person, andĮvery one of his narrators was a bit of an anomaly - a bookish man, humorous and gallant, and at wit's end. In those early doubts and wonderings went to the heart of his achievement. Yet for all the misconceptions in that review - Melville's New York and Boston roots were incontestable, his South Seas voyages were real enough - something The very name ''Herman Melville'' fell, the reviewer said, ''suspiciously on our ear.''Īmericans have been laughing at that snobby British response for a century and a half. Magazine in Edinburgh and all but unmasked Melville as an English worthy pretending to be a humble American sailor. A famous early review of Melville's work, nicely described by Mr. Yet he wrote with the cheerful air of a cultured gentleman, sure of his way around the bookcase. He claimed to have spent his youth as a lowly seaman ''before the mast,'' laboring among the most grimly oppressed of theġ9th-century proletarians. Melville's prose style, even in its early, leaner phase, aroused a measure of incredulity all by itself. The three shrunken human heads dangling over the narrator's bed, the cooking vat lined with human bones, still moist, ''with particles of flesh clinging to them here and there!'' Those were weighty scenes toĪccept from an author who was otherwise unknown to the literary world.
Yet how could anyone read those first astonishing books of his and fail to raise an eyebrow? The beauteous Polynesian nymphs swimming out to the whaling ship for a shipboard orgy with the sex-starved sailors, In Britain the attacks on Melville's bona fides were harsh enough to damage sales, and his publisher pestered him for proof that the voyages had actually taken place. ''Typee'' found its way into print even so, followed by ''Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas'' Īnd the skepticism spread. Real-life experiences were other than as described, and they returned the manuscript. But as Hershel Parker shows in ''Herman Melville: A Biography,'' the publishers suspected at once that Melville's To the far Pacific and submitted the book to Harper & Brothers. He wrote ''Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life'' in 1845, described it as a faithful narrative of his voyage Readers have wanted to know the truth behind Herman Melville's books from the very first moments of his literary career.
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