Melville, Herman

Melville, Herman (1819–91), American novelist of Scottish and Dutch descent, born in New York City. His father died in 1832 leaving the family in straitened circumstances and Melville was forced to leave school. He first went to sea aged 18 as a cabin boy in a packet ship plying between New York and Liverpool. In January 1841 he signed on in the whaler Acushnet bound for the South Pacific. In June 1842 he deserted with another sailor at Nukahiva in the Marquesas Islands because of the living conditions on board and the harsh treatment meted out by the ship's master and the ‘bucko’ mate. In August 1842 he was registered as a crew member of an Australian whaler, Lucy Ann, an unprofitable venture that provoked him to mutiny. He was jailed in Tahiti but managed to escape without difficulty, and by November 1842 he was back in the USA where he signed on as a harpooner aboard the whaler Charles & Henry. Six months later he landed at Lahaina in the Hawaiian Islands, and three months after that signed on as an ordinary seaman in the US frigate United States which discharged him at Boston in October 1844. He then returned home to write Typee, a Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), and followed it with a sequel, Omoo, a Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847). Both sold well and they soon made him one of America's most popular novelists. The same year as Omoo was published he married and in 1850 bought a farm near the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who became a strong influence on his early career.

Melville's first two novels were, to some extent, autobiographical but were embellished with adventures and experiences which he had gleaned from other sources. Yet they are valuable for the vividness with which they describe the manners, conditions of life, and customs of the Polynesian tribes, at that time subject to the attempts of missionaries to convert them to Christianity. Melville's characters reveal the superficiality of these attempts and while there is little of the ‘noble savage’ belief in his writing, he does bring out the quick reversion to tribal customs and beliefs as the thin veneer of conversion wears off.

His next novel, a philosophical romance called Mardi, and a Voyage Thither (1849), was not well received and he followed it quickly with Redburn: His First Voyage (1849), for which he drew on his time as a cabin boy. Then in 1850 he published White Jacket: Or the World in a Man-of-War, a novel based on his experiences aboard the United States. It was highly critical of naval discipline and the issue of spirits aboard ship (see grog), and it has been said the former criticism contributed to the end of flogging in the US Navy with the cat-o'-nine-tails.

While writing these three books he began work on the novel by which he is best known today: Moby-Dick or the White Whale (1851), one of the true classics of marine literature. For it he drew on his experience on whalers for the authentic flavour of whaling in the days of sail. The book, made up of 135 chapters written in many different styles, is full of detail of whales, their habits and anatomy, and tells the story of the undying love/hate relationship between Captain Ahab, of the whaler Pequod, and Moby-Dick, an immense and ferocious white whale which in an earlier encounter had been responsible for the loss of one of Ahab's legs. Ahab searches for the whale halfway round the world, having sworn to kill it to avenge his injury. The two meet in the end, Moby-Dick is harpooned by Ahab, but in the last sound of the dying whale the harpoon line catches round Ahab and drags him down into the depths.

Moby-Dick did not sell well, and Melville's popularity as an author waned further when, in 1852, he published Pièrre, or the Ambiguities, a psychological novel of incestuous passion which alienated so many of his readers that the sales of his previous books dropped alarmingly. To add to his misfortune, a fire at his publishers in 1853 destroyed the plates of his books, and many unsold copies. Two years later he published a historical novel, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, then came a collection of short stories Piazza Tales (1856), and a satire, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). This was the last novel he was to publish in his lifetime for he then chose to abandon novels for poetry.

In 1863 he moved to New York. To earn a steady income, something he had always craved, he became a customs inspector in 1866, writing little more than occasional poems and articles. In 1888 he published a biography, John Marr and Other Sailors, and shortly before he died he finished Billy Budd, Foretopman, which was published posthumously in 1924. In this long short story, a great and deserved success, he wove his story around the activities of the press gang in Britain and the bitter cruelties and injustices of life in the navy during the Napoleonic War (1803–15), a story that Benjamin Britten later turned into an opera. By the time he died Melville had been forgotten, and his death was marked by only one obituary.

Bibliography

Arvin, N. , Herman Melville (1976).
Rosenberry, E. , Melville (1979).