Chekhov’s Mistess

Birnbaum, Delbanco, Melville, Life

Robert Birnbaum’s The Morning News interview of Andrew Delbanco, the author of Melville, his World and Work is about as far reaching as you’ll find, covering everything from Melville to writing, education and bird flu. So what’d you expect?

As further enticement, I offer a brief excerpt:

RB: Who is responsible for his [Melville’s] resurrection in the 20th century?

AD: It really began in the ‘20s and actually began in England. D.H. Lawrence was an important figure in bringing him back.

RB: Whom you describe as a soul mate. You didn’t say much about that in your book.

AD: A quester, someone seeking the high peaks of sensory experience, and also aware that civilization is a fragile thing. Their minds moved in similar directions. Lawrence has two essays about Melville, one about the early fiction and one about Moby Dick, wonderful evocative essays. So he was partly responsible. But the academic who gets the prize was actually a Columbia professor, so that makes me feel good.

…this was a Columbia professor [Raymond Weaver] and when his senior colleague in the department, the famous Mark Van Doren, suggested to him that he look into this obscure American writer, he did so and visited the granddaughter and he heard about this manuscript and the manuscript was, of course, Billy Budd, which Melville’s wife had kept in a tin bread box and protected for the rest of her life after her husband died. Eventually this Columbia professor published an edition of Billy Budd and that opened the floodgates and people began to return to the earlier work and rediscovered Moby Dick. There are deeper reasons Melville came back to life in the early 20th century. Moby Dick is, after all, a book about an eloquent demagogue who manages to turn this crew away from what they think the purpose of the voyage is and he turns them into an instrument of his will on his personal voyage of vengeance. You don’t have to think too hard to see why that would have been resonant in the ‘30s and ‘40s.

comments

It was a great interview, wasn’t it?!?  I knew it existed b/c Andy is my colleague and I saw him in Boston later the same day he’d been interviewed, and have been looking forward to reading it (the Birnbaum interview is always very rewarding)--I was not disappointed....

    – Jenny D (02/24  at  12:02 AM)

You forgot to link to the interview.

    – masale.wallah (02/24  at  01:17 AM)

I believe that it was actually Lewis Mumford who was responsible for the Melville revival. I should check into it.

I did read some of Delbanco’s biography and his views of Melville’s literaty output is mistifying. The only work of Melville that he really seems to like is Moby Dick.

    – scribe (03/08  at  12:05 AM)

This is what wikipedia has to say about the Melville revival. This online source of information isn’t always reliable but in this case I believe they are correct.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Melville

“After the success of stories and travelogues based on voyages to the South Seas during his youth, Melville’s popularity declined. In the later years of his life and during the years after his death he was recognized as only a minor figure in American literature. The publication in 1921 of Billy Budd and Lewis Mumford’s biography Herman Melville: A study of His Life and Vision began a revival in critical studies of Melville’s work. This work was followed by a string of important criticism and biography, including Jay Leyda’s The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891 and Leon Howard’s Herman Melville: A Biography. Due to these works and the subsequent profusion of research on Melville’s work Melville became universally recognized as a major canonical figure. Today he may be the most written-about American author.”

    – scribe (03/08  at  12:08 AM)

Scribe, did you read the book? The Wikipedia entry attributes the publication of Billy Budd as well as Mumford’s biography. Fair enough. Billy Budd, which Weaver was responsible for publishing, was published in 1924. Mumford’s book did not come out until 1929.

It could only be a matter of opinion which had the greater affect, but in fact, his revival was probably not so simple as a biography or book being issued. Reading Delbanco’s text, you’ll see a far more slow and complicated revival, with D.H. Lawrence saying in 1921, he was a “futurist long before futurism,” and E.M. Forster in ‘27 writing of Melville’s “prophetic song,” and there are others. The reason I question your reading of the book is that this is only on page 11. 

I also disagree with your mystification over Delbanco’s focus on Moby Dick. That’s only really in the opening pages. If you care about this topic, which you would seem to, I urge you to read the book, and then make judgements.

    – Bud Parr (03/08  at  08:43 AM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: February 23, 2006
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

• Comments:5
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