Herman Melville Herman Melville A Half Known Life John Bryant Volume I Eternal Ifs: Infant, Boy, and Man (1819–1840) This edition first published 2021 © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of John Bryant to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with law. 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Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Names: Bryant, John, 1949– author. Title: Herman Melville: a half known life / John L. Bryant. Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley-Blackwell, [2020] | This resource is a multipart monograph with two volumes. | Contents: A half known life – The biography of a half known life. Identifiers: LCCN 2020016327 (print) | LCCN 2020016328 (ebook) | ISBN 9781405121903 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119072690 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119106005 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Melville, Herman, 1819–1891. | Novelists, American–19th century–Biography. Classification: LCC PS2386 .B79 2020 (print) | LCC PS2386 (ebook) | DDC 813/.3–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016327 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016328 Cover Design: Wiley Cover Images: © portrait of Herman Melville © Anita Impagliazzo, charcoal portrait after oil portrait by Asa Twitchell, Liverpool from the Sea © duncan1890/Getty Images, Letter of Herman Melville 1828, The Osborne Collection of Herman Melville Materials, Special Collections, Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas Set in 10/12pt Bembo by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Virginia Blanford Contents Preface xi Introduction 1 Part I Manhattan and Albany (1819–1832) 15 1 Last Leaves, New Leaf 17 2 Commerce and Providence 29 3 Home and Street 37 4 Awakenings 53 5 The Secret of Our Paternity 69 6 A Marriage of New England and New York 83 7 Recuperations 91 8 Schoolboy and Reader 97 9 The Birth of Ishmael 109 Part II Growing Up Gansevoort (1832–1836) 117 10 Patriarch and Hero 119 11 Gansevoort and the Indians 131 12 Broken Temple 141 13 Jackson and the Negro 151 14 Albany and Africa 157 15 Black Gansevoort 169 16 Mourning and Arousal 177 17 Summer of Plague 187 18 Spoils and Debt 199 19 Working Boy: Steam and Temptation 205 20 Moving Up 217 vii Contents Part III Sibling Coterie (1836) 225 21 Brother Gansevoort 227 22 Happiness and Power 243 23 Sister Helen 253 24 “Emancipated school-girl” 263 25 Sister Augusta 281 26 Dark-Eyed Darling 295 27 Composing Yourself 307 Part IV Inland Identities: Farmer, Teacher, Debater, Lover, Actor, Writer (1836–1839) 319 28 “Deep inland there I” 321 29 Uncle Thomas 331 30 Schoolmaster 345 31 Debater and Cosmopolite 359 32 Lansingburgh: River Banks and Bankruptcy 377 33 The Intimacy of Reading 385 34 “Occasional writting & reading” 399 35 “Love is then our Duty” 413 36 Published Writer 429 Part V The Imperative of Travel (1839) 441 37 “On the go-off” 443 38 Circumambulating the City 453 39 “Sort of a looking sailor” 463 40 A Brotherhood of Outcasts 471 41 Secret Sympathy 483 Part VI First Voyage (1839) 491 42 Along the Marge 493 43 His First Crew 499 44 Learning the Ropes 507 45 “No school like a ship for studying human nature” 517 46 Irish Sea and Liverpool 529 Part VII Liverpool and Back (1839–1840) 543 47 The Liverpool of His Father 545 48 Roscoe and The Picture of Liverpool 559 viii Contents 49 What Melville Saw in Liverpool 575 50 The Moment of Liverpool 585 51 Home Again; Teacher Again 595 52 Rent 607 53 Maria’s Boys 619 ix Preface Biography is impossible, it is said. If we cannot fully “know” ourselves or our contemporaries, how can we possibly know the life of someone born 200 years ago? I never sat with Herman Melville, never observed his daily quirks, his manner of speaking, dressing, moving about the house. I’ve not observed his moods around strangers, shipmates, editors, friends, or family. All I really know of him are his writ- ings, mostly prose fictions, many poems, a couple essays and reviews, and lamentably few letters. Like several worthy predecessors, this biography is a narrative of the known facts of Melville’s childhood, adolescence, young manhood, maturity, and old age. But narratives are notoriously subjective and speculative. Biography cannot give you The Life; it can only simulate a life, and what good is a simulation; thus, biography is said to be impossible. Even so, biography is as inevitable as it is impossible; we desire it. But why? Aren’t Typee, Moby‐Dick, “Bartleby,” and Billy Budd all that we need? Yet we want more as we read perhaps because Melville’s works – many of them auto‐fictions – have the urgency of self‐exploration. We seek a connection between his writing and his life as if his creative process and his life experiences were linked versions of the same thing. We want to know how this remarkable writer survived the accidents in his life (some tragic) and the traumas of his everyday living (in adolescence and mid‐life); how he absorbed the world around him (white and black; male, female, and other; material and immaterial); how he learned to translate himself into his writings. I cannot claim that my biography – or any biography – can give you a full knowing of a writer’s life. We might, however, try different ways of “half knowing” Melville. The subtitle of this biography– “A Half Known Life” – comes from a passage in Moby‐Dick that equates the human soul with an “insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy” that is surrounded by “all the horrors of the half known life.” We cannot know peace and joy, Melville suggests, without knowing horror, nor horror without peace and joy. It is a world of interdependencies. The “half known” horrors in our lives are public and private. Social structures, whose power strings are pulled by seemingly invisible agents, have given us slavery, Indian removal, species extinction, xi Preface urban poverty, alienation, and war. But our private horrors seem utterly adventitious and accidental: the loss of a father and of a son, battles with whales, the threat of the cannibal, or the anxieties of variable sexualities. Melville’s life also suggests to us that certain quirks of thought and strange emotions, certain shocks of recognition penetrating our very being, and a certain gift for language enabled him to write out and through these public and private horrors. What draws us to Melville, and draws me to the impossible art of biography, is that while we cannot know this writer fully, we can know his writings, and knowing how those writings work, in manu- script and in print, is an opening that exposes the unique imperative in him to write. If we can grasp at this fundamental dynamic in his life, we might in turn be able to read his writings in the context of his evolution as an artist. One other impossibility. Herman Melville: A Half Known Life is a literary and “critical” biography, and yet, since the 1940s and the rise of the New Criticism the field of literary interpretation has held “biographical criticism” in low regard. In the view of many critics, biography is impossible because knowing the life does not help us read the writings. The assumption is that a novel or poem contains within it all the information we need in order to interpret it, and that Melville’s intended meanings, his creative process, and revisions have no bearing on how we interpret the final, published work itself.