The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 1, 1819-1851 by Hershel ParkerJennifer Travis
Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 1, 1819-1851. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996. 941 pp. $39.95.
“Typee,” as Herman Melville was called for several years after the success of his first novel, was not only hailed by reviewers as the Modern Crusoe but also harangued by a host of critics for his “sexual license”; Herman Melville, the seafaring storyteller, much to his own surprise, was emerging as America’s first literary sex symbol. Indeed, Hershel Parker’s new biography of Melville’s early life and career reminds us that the New Melville of recent years is not unlike the Melville of old: narratives exploring eroticism and exposing expansionism have intrigued (and often scandalized) readers from the start.
It is just this start that Parker’s biography amply details: from Melville’s recognition aboard the United States that it is “manly to love literature” to his cultivation of a literary friendship with Hawthorne, the man who, according to Melville, “dropped germinous seeds into my soul.” Despite Melville’s metaphoric birthing of Moby-Dick, Parker’s narrative details a world of lost fathers. Melville’s anxieties in the literary marketplace are set against his father’s utter failures; Gansevoort, Herman’s older brother (and literary agent) tragically dies as Typee, the book he has been shopping, gains success; and it is the reluctant Hawthorne who unknowingly inspires Melville, the “thought-diver,” to try his harpoon at the big whale. This is not to say that the lifelong financial distresses of Maria Melville or Herman’s extensive courtship of Lizzie Shaw are not in evidence, but rather that they are lesser tales. Perhaps it is a tribute to Parker’s own success as a storyteller that this voluminous account could leave a reader wanting more, not only about Melville’s relationship with his wife or mother but also about his position in an American literary marketplace that is flooded, on the very evening at the Lenox Hotel that Melville proudly hands his masterpiece to Hawthorne, by what Melville’s mentor infamously described as a mob of scribbling women. [Jennifer Travis]