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Rating:  - A World of Hurt
Some parts of Melville's writing are so dense even he got confused in them, for perhaps it was not his conscious self in charge of the words spilling out on the page in splendid, mordant constellation. At the end of his life, he returned after 30 years of sometimes brilliant poetry to write one last short novel, BILLY BUDD, in which most of the quixotic exuberance of PIERRE and MOBY DICK, of earlier years, seems to have been burnt away, as if by great pain.
Intriguing to hear the story (such as it is) of THE ISLE OF THE CROSS, Melville's lost novel, rejected by Harpers Magazine and then disappeared. Maybe this book will return to us someday, miracles have happened before. Written at the height of Melville's powers, ISLE emerges under Delbanco's suggestive treatment as a parable of his relations with Hawthorne, and the pull of the land versus the romance of the sea.
The great pain must have been the suicide of Mackie, Melville's son, who killed himself at age 18 at home; the coroner decided it must have been an accident, a pistol shot gone wrong, after th family protested his earlier ruling of suicide. How awful to think of Lizzie worrying that Malcolm wasn't getting up in the morning, he'd be late for work, and Melville saying, let him stay in bed if he needs to, and he'll pay for his tardiness if he needs to. And then at the end of the day, when they finally made their way into his bedroom, he was long dead, the gun at his side. Though Delbanco says that we will never know if Melville was a homosexual, it seems to me that the whole Mackie drama doesn't make much sense unless you allow he possibility that the boy killed himself to protect himself from further sexual predation by his father. And that CLAREL, JOHN MARR, and BILLY BUDD were the father's attempts to make sense of the wrong he had done the boy.
Rating:  - Brevity is Wit
Andrew Delbanco has given us an accessible and meaningful account of the writing, life, and world of Herman Melville. This is by no means an exhaustive biography, but Delbanco successfully gives us a good background on his life and times. He weaves literary interpretation, biography, and history into one poetic yarn. He draws on a lot of sources, including letters to or from Melville, but these sources are by no means a crutch to lean on. It was a very enjoyable read, and would be worthwhile to a literary scholar or to educated laypersons, regardless of having previously read a Melville biography or not. It is recommended that one have at least a cursory knowledge of American literature before diving into this word-storm, and I say that approvingly.
Rating: - From Sea Yarn to High Tragedy
Melville is something of an enigma, as if his brief and quickly declining career were a stage for the apparition called Moby Dick, most likely the Great American Novel, and one of the few novels ever written to approach the tragic mode in the true sense. This brisk and not overly detailed biography is a good lean introduction to the life, or what's known of it, and thus a fitting portrait of the secret intensity of the man behind his sluggish career as a writer. None of which matters beside the magnificence of the greatest of all sea yarns.
Rating: - The Failure Of Moby Dick
Mr. Delbanco has published a readable and condensed biography of Herman Melville. Unlike the definitive and massive two volume epic biography by Newton Arvin, "Herman Melville" (which won the National Book Award), Mr. Delbanco does not attempt to cover Melville's life day by day.
A soaring comet with the success of his first two books ("Typee" and "Omoo"), Melville faded into obscurity with the collapse of his popularity with each new book. "Moby Dick" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (by Mark Twain) compete with each other for the title of the first great American Novel. But what they had in common was poor sales, poor reviews, and acceptance only after their deaths. Mr Delbanco explains why the reading public rejected "Moby Dick" and his other novels. While Mr. Arvin's exhaustive account was published a half-century ago, Mr. Delbanco has written a fresh and lively account of the interesting life of Melville.
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