Complexity Reduced to a Complex
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Complexity Reduced to a Complex Melville By Edwin Haviland Miller Venture/Braziller. 382 pp. $15.00. Reviewed by Phoebe Pettingell Although Edward Haviland Miller's Melville is labeled a...
...As F. O. Matthiessen wrote of Freudian Melville criticism in 1949, too, most efforts "have tended so far to deflect from any comprehensive study of the works, and to compensate with no reliable biography, owing to the loose liberties that have been taken with known facts.' Herman Melville's unique stature among American novelists is based on his ability to render with Shakespearean power the complexities of human emotion and endeavor, and to explore the mystery of man's existence in a universe that may be malign or indifferent...
...Significantly, the generation that resuscitated his critical reputation was trained to appreciate 17th-century metaphysical poetry and James Joyce as well as Freudian psychology...
...The informed reader, meanwhile, will be troubled by persistent reductionism...
...The "honeymoon" of Ishmael and Queequeg is meant to triumphantly affirm the brotherhood of man, not to represent "sterile" homosexual "byplay...
...When the critic's hubris makes him the doctor, the artist is laid on a Procrustean couch where only obsession and neurosis can be displayed...
...When he died in 1891, at the age of 71, he was still revising Billy Budd...
...The second theme is the recurring "Ishmael" figure, typified by such heroes as Redburn, Pierre, Bartleby, and, of course, the famous narrator of Moby-Dick...
...The son of Abraham and Sarah's Egyptian slave, the Biblical Ishmael is driven into the wilderness with his mother to prevent any challenge to Isaac's birthright (Genesis 16, 18...
...This psychodrama might be more convincing if Miller's liberal summaries were not sprinkled with omissions and distortions...
...Maria and her favored eldest, Gansevoort, are Sarah and Isaac, while Herman, the family ugly duckling, is Ishmael...
...Miller also obscurely claims that "the parallel to Melville's own lot is hardly accidental...
...At 70 he affirmed the valor of innocence...
...he is Starbuck (an affectionate husband and father...
...His last two books were printed at his own expense...
...It recognized a kindred spirit in this man who wrote, "Let the ambiguous procession of events reveal their own ambiguousness...
...The elder boys, Gansevoort and Herman, were supposed to help support the family, but the latter (whose education had been spotty, and who was still in his early teens) drifted from job to job, eventually beginning a sporadic sea career at 19...
...Neither of his sons outlived him, and he was only able to retire in 1885 after he and his wife inherited some money...
...He married, bought a farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and fell under the influence of a neighboring fellow-novelist, Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom Melville dedicated Moby-Dick...
...Similarly, to associate the loss of Ahab's leg with castration, he several times incorrectly refers to the injury as a wound of the groin, ignoring the fact that there is a stump...
...and in all high instances they paint them without any vanity, though at times with a lurking something that would take several pages to properly define...
...But elsewhere he shows how Allan's presence made childhood problems for his melancholy son, while the always dominating Maria lived fully 21 years after the publication of Moby-Dick Miller's style is as labored and muddy as his interpretation...
...Four years' experience in the South Seas supplied the material for Herman's early, autobiographical novels, Typee, Omoo, Redburn, and White-Jacket as well as the milieu for his greater, philosophical novels...
...Allan Melvill is identified with Abraham (on the principle that death is desertion...
...He neglects to mention characters that have no place in his scheme, for example Hautia (Mardi), despite her seeming to be an earlier version of the mysterious Isabel in Pierre...
...Its effectiveness rests in our empathy with Captain Vere's predicament...
...He was the second son of Allan Melvill (the final "e" was a later addition), whose father had been an "Indian" at the Boston Tea Party, and Maria Gansevoort Melvill, daughter of the richest man in Albany...
...The affluence of the family did not last...
...If the inference is that she conceived from a book, it is no more surprising than the idea that, as children, Herman and his seven siblings "no doubt sensed in their intuitive wisdom that Allan, like Ahab, spoke in the irrelevant heroics of a dead era...
...The first is the friendship with Hawthorne which initially inspired both men to some of their best writing, and ended in ambiguous estrangement...
...For poets...
...Melville may be Ishmael, yet he is more—he is Queequeg (his South Seas experiences...
...He writes that "Almost nightly during the early years of their marriage Herman read chapters of Mardi to his wife...
...Ishmael is a "wild man" and thus the ideal Melvillian prototype for man not chosen by his Creator, out of harmony with society...
...at his darkest he is Ahab (bereft of everything but a magnificent use of language...
...Since the Melville centennial revival in 1919, biographers have been combing through his work with the energy of Ahab, in pursuit of that lurking something...
...far from being a case-history of infantile regression, Billy Budd is one of the subtlest explorations of the paradoxes of justice, human and divine...
...I question Miller's assumption that our identification in the story is exclusively with Billy...
...and childbearing women "assert the life principle...
...And he is none of them—he is Herman Melville, lonely, aloof, mystifying, who chooses to remain something of a stranger...
...When it was finished she was pregnant...
...Miller's plot summaries nothwithstanding, someone unfamiliar with Melville will have a hard time following his life or his works...
...Following several trips abroad, Herman managed to obtain a post as a customs inspector at the port of New York in 1866...
...Melville's history is an unhappy chronicle...
...Miller seldom sticks to chronology, choosing rather to concentrate on two main aspects of his subject...
...Melville exposed himself to this approach when he wrote in a review of Hawthorne, "If you look rightly for it, you will almost always find that the author himself has somewhere furnished you with his own picture...
...Miller writes of Billy Budd that "Like an infant he has no fear of death, if he can conceive of death at all," yet on this point Melville specifically says, "Not that like children Billy was incapable of conceiving what death really is...
...He describes Ishmael as "about thirteen" (though the Bible reports he is "carried" by his mother) and refers to Abraham as refusing a blessing, an evident confusion with the story of Jacob and Esau...
...Encouraged by the success of Typee (1843), he decided to try earning a living as a writer...
...He is a world of diverse men with separate purposes on a common voyage...
...When Melville was working on Moby-Dick he wrote in his copy of King Lear, "The infernal nature has a valor often denied to innocence...
...He died two years later, mad and deeply in debt...
...People have not died: their "embers burned out," or they paid their "last debt to life...
...Reviewed by Phoebe Pettingell Although Edward Haviland Miller's Melville is labeled a biography, it is really one more Freudian speculation on the relationship between a man's life and his art...
...It is fairly evident from his letters that Melville was "in love" with the older man, but how is an unanswerable question that has produced much fruitless speculation and Miller has little to add...
...in 1830, Allan lost his money and business...
...being painters of nature, are like their brethren of the pencil who in the multitude of likenesses to be sketched, do not invariably omit their own...
...Miller proceeds to trace this quadumvirate throughout the writings, and believes that Herman/Ishmael's early "rejection" explains his preference for the male world of ships, and the quest of his emotionally stunted heroes for a benevolent father-friend such as Melville had found in Hawthorne...
...Freudian criticism is most successful when art is seen as the therapist, pointing us toward a solution for our anxieties, affirming that we live for a purpose, and leading us in the direction of health...
...For Miller the core of the story is paternal rejection...
...It is certainly worth noting that Allan Melvill's madness took the form of extravagant language, yet that does not make him Ahab, or explain why we are affected by the Captain's marvelous Elizabethan rhetoric...
...Most offensive is Miller's interpretation of Billy Budd, where the hero "becomes Isaac at a price he willingly, even joyously pays: he remains forever arrested as a 'childman.' He welcomes the arrestment, accepts castration...
...Having observed that Ahab's parents both died when he was a year old...
...One obituary remarked that most people had thought him dead for years, while another characterized his works as having been meant "more for private than public circulation...
...From then on he produced only poems and short novels...
...None of his books, however, were as well-received as the first...
Vol. 59 • March 1976 • No. 5
