'Tell Truth, & Shame the Devel'

“There is no characteristic Melville book. Recognizable themes and ideas run through them, but they have no family resemblance at all.” 

Melville is one of the few writers I resolved to read and reread sequentially, first book to last, and only then did I realize the truth of Guy Davenport’s observation above. To describe his work as “tales of the sea” is about as useful as pigeonholing Nabokov’s fiction as “lusty tales of romance.” By 1988, I had already read most of Melville, though not Omoo, Israel Potter and Clarel. That summer I interviewed Melville's great-grandson, the late Paul Metcalf, who suggested I read everything in order of publication, and I did. There was more to dislike this time than I had expected, including Mardi: and a Voyage Thither (1849) and Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852). Melville could be pretentious, his prose hopelessly overinflated, and I’ve never cared for the overly schematic Billy Budd. Today, no longer a hero-worshipper, I value Moby-Dick, most of the short fiction and much of the poetry, especially the Civil War poems.

 

Davenport is reviewing the second hefty volume of Hershel Parker’s biography of Melville (and other volumes related to him) in the June 2002 issue of Harper’s. Typically, he sees Melville as a knot in a vast literary net. No writer works in pure isolation, especially one so book-dependent as Melville. Davenport relates underappreciated Israel Potter to Fielding, Defoe, Mann, Brecht and Roy Lichtenstein(!), a very Melvillean rollcall.

 

“Genius seems to thrive,” Davenport writes,  “on inadequacy. Melville had almost as little education as Mark Twain. His spelling was that of a dyslexic child. His wife and his sister Augusta copied—and respelled—his manuscripts for the printer. His knowledge of literature was an ongoing lifelong self-education. His reading of Milton and Shakespeare (once he’d found an edition with type large enough for his weak eyes) gave Moby-Dick its magnificent, flexible prose.”

 

More than most writers, Melville has been the object of crackpot theories, including some involving wife-beating and global capitalism. My experience tells me to read him straight, on his own terms, and deep-six the self-indulgent academic bullshit. Davenport agrees:

 

“He does not abuse his wife, nor has he a suspicious eye for male good looks. . . . Parker pays particular attention to Melville’s reading and aesthetic passion for poetry and the graphic arts. His mind was open to Blake and Henry James. He is not a misanthrope and recluse in his latter days . . .”

 

At his best – in Moby-Dick, most obviously – Melville is excellent company. His masterpiece is made to be read across a lifetime, as we grow and age and learn humility. The novelist John Gardner told me Ishmael as narrator was a great comedian and Moby-Dick ought to be read as a comedy (Fart jokes! Penis jokes!). Davenport writes:

 

“[Melville] was by temperament a vagabond whose fate was to be grounded periodically by responsibilities and disappointments. He loved picnics, friendships, snug rooms, his wife, his children, and abrupt departures (for Europe, for San Francisco, for Illinois). He went all around Italy, England, and Palestine with a carpetbag containing a journal, a few shirts, and a change of socks. He liked good wine and a pipe. When signing books he wrote, ‘Tell Truth, & shame the Devel [sic].’”

 

Melville was born on this date, August 1, in 1819, and died on September 28, 1891, age seventy-two.