Michael Dirda

Herman Melville turns out to be the big one that almost got away.

MELVILLE

His World and Work

By Andrew Delbanco

Knopf. 415 pp. $30

The life and afterlife of Herman Melville (1819-1891) present the greatest illustration in American literature, perhaps in world literature, of the Psalm "The same stone which the builders refused is become the head-stone." After the popular success of Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), which led to the young Melville being dubbed "the man who lived among cannibals," he embarked on a literary career that went gradually, then precipitously, downhill. By the time he was 40 he had essentially abandoned fiction altogether, tried publishing poetry with comparable success (i.e., none), and finally resigned himself -- he was, after all, married, with four children and debts -- to spending the rest of his life as a customs inspector for the city of New York. When he died, the newspaper obituary misprinted his name as "Henry Melville."

His work was never entirely forgotten, though he was chiefly regarded as a writer of sea stories (Joseph Conrad, another specialist in "the watery part of the world," didn't think much of them). And then in the 1920s a Melville revival unexpectedly kicked into gear. In 1921, Raymond Weaver brought out the first biography ( Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic ); in 1923, D.H. Lawrence devoted more pages to Melville in his dithyrambic Studies in Classic American Literature than to any other writer ("a deep, great artist"); in 1924, the rediscovered Billy Budd was published; and by the 1930s the poet Charles Olson had begun to track down the dispersed volumes of Melville's library in New York's used bookshops. More and ever more scholarly work appeared as teachers and critics of every theoretical bent discovered an oceanic textual richness and complexity in his masterpiece, Moby-Dick (1851). After World War II the suspicion, then conviction grew ever stronger that Melville's titanic meditation on Good and Evil, and almost everything else (except romantic love), just might be that elusive White Whale of our literature, the great American novel.

For anyone who cares about writing (or any of the arts), Melville's story is obviously both dispiriting and consoling. It is also a story that Andrew Delbanco tells surpassingly well.

Not that he hasn't had help in re-creating the writer's world. During the past 10 or 15 years we have seen no shortage of Melvillean biography, from the scholarly life's work of Hershel Parker (two daunting volumes) to the very brief Penguin volume (155 pages) by Elizabeth Hardwick. For the general reader, though, Delbanco offers a more satisfying book than either of these. First of all, this academic writes with exceptional clarity and wit (he possesses a taste for subtle, hardly noticeable wordplay). He also displays a masterly ability to summarize a book or an argument and is generous in acknowledging the scholarship of others. He periodically underscores the continued relevance of Melville's complex themes -- man's ambiguous relationship to Nature, the persistence of social and racial inequities, America's imperialistic sense of manifest destiny, the shiftiness of sexuality -- and yet he doesn't belabor the obvious or thump any tubs. This Columbia professor also surprises by including a page from a Mad magazine parody of Moby-Dick , a Gahan Wilson cartoon of Captain Ahab, and an exchange about Billy Budd (as a homosexual text) from an episode of "The Sopranos." When Delbanco writes about New York City and its importance to Melville's work, he reveals his own unambiguous but not unambivalent love for his hometown.

In short, it would be hard to imagine a more inviting overview of Melville for our time. I've admired Delbanco's work before, in particular, Required Reading , though that was essentially a collection of brief essays. This full-length study points up even more forcefully the truth of that earlier book's subtitle -- "Why Our American Classics Matter Now" -- by focusing on one major author. The result is humane and relevant scholarship at its best.

In little more than a decade -- between his mid-twenties and late-thirties -- Herman Melville produced eight or nine novels (at least one never published and now lost) and a half-dozen or so short stories. He could write with surprising speed, which may explain in part why so many of his books are rambling, disjointed, phantasmagoric, sententious and often boring. Aside from Melville scholars, who ever looks into Mardi or Israel Potter ? In recent years Pierre: or the Ambiguities has gained its champions (many critics view its incest motif as a mask for Melville's possible homosexuality), while The Confidence-Man almost seems a post-modern meditation on the slipperiness of identity. Melville's poetry has been championed too, especially by Robert Penn Warren. I myself remember when "On the Slain Collegians" was widely read -- back in 1970, shortly after the killings at Kent State.

In truth, though, only four works live for us today, but what works they are! Moby-Dick , of course, but also Billy Budd , which Thomas Mann called "the most beautiful story in the world" and wished he could have written (which isn't surprising since Billy in his beauty and innocence could be the slightly more weather-beaten cousin of Tadzio in Death in Venice ). Recall the story's basic plot: A handsome and guileless young seaman is falsely accused of sedition by a ship's master-at arms; in the captain's cabin Billy, after a moment of stuttering frustration, lashes out at the evil Claggart and his single blow inadvertently kills the officer, while the sympathetic Captain Vere looks on in dismay.

From this scenario Melville constructs a drama of moral (and interpretative) complexity the equal of Sophocles' Antigone . Billy Budd is, for all its gnarled and even rebarbative syntax, astonishingly moving, as it takes up such ethical heartbreakers as the fate of purity and innocence in a fallen world, the conflicts between duty and desire, legality and human compassion, and the saintly example of unqualified forgiveness. No surprise that E.M. Forster made it the libretto for that rare thing, an almost equally great and moving work of art in another medium, Benjamin Britten's opera "Billy Budd."