cover image Melville: A Biography

Melville: A Biography

Laurie Robertson-Lorant. Clarkson N Potter Publishers, $40 (928pp) ISBN 978-0-517-59314-1

""Though I wrote the Gospels in this century,"" Herman Melville gloomily predicted in 1851, ""I should die in the gutter."" Not quite. Yet as he reached 40 in 1859, already the author of MobyDick and a half-dozen other books, success seemed unattainable. Moby Dick, perhaps the greatest American novel, would earn $1260 over the 32 years that remained to Melville, and he was dependent on handouts and inheritances from his wife's family. Intermittently unstable, the ex-seaman found a job in later life as a customs inspector and wrote poetry that, he confessed, was ""eminently adapted for unpopularity."" When remembered, if at all, it was, erroneously, as a minor travel writer about the South Pacific. In nautical terms, poet and Melville scholar Robertson-Lorant writes that ""as long as the values of the marketplace ruled,"" Melville was ""doomed to be a castaway."" Only in 1924, a generation after his death, did the publication of his unfinished late masterpiece, Billy Budd, launch his reputation. Analyses since the 1960s have focused upon Melville's psychology, in particular his probable bisexuality, handled well here. Newly discovered Melville family letters, found in a New York barn in 1984, offer fresh perspectives, according to Robertson-Lorant, but these have already been exploited, and ""what the women in the family had to say"" alters the picture only marginally. As a new biography assimilating recent research, this one will do until the next comes along; however, it is vitiated by irrelevant, often florid absurdities. High on any list of them must be that writing Moby-Dick was ""a feat worthy of Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Browne, Lord Byron, and Paul Bunyan combined."" Readers will need a mental blue pencil. Photos not seen by PW. (June)