Genius lost in fiction

The Passages of Herman Melville

IF YOU know little or nothing about Herman Melville, then you may well enjoy Jay Parini’s fictionalised biography. Subtitled ‘The tumultuous life and fierce loves of one of the world’s greatest writers’, his fictional account of the author of Moby Dick is an uneasy compromise between fact and fiction. The more you know about Melville and the more you admire his work, the less you will like Parini’s version of his life.

Parini wants to have it all: to be factually convincing and also free to invent whatever suits his purpose. He creates a monologue for Melville’s wife, Lizzie, which works well enough. In alternate sections he gives a blow-by-blow documentary account of Melville’s long life. This is where problems arise: how much is Parini inventing, and how much is fact? Is he inventing a particular detail, has he made up the letter he is quoting from, or are both historical?

Melville had a long and eventful life, born in 1819 into a once-illustrious but now impoverished New York family. A book-loving young man, he was deprived of a college education by the early death of his father, and in 1839 he signed on as a merchant seaman for a round trip to Liverpool. Back on shore he failed to settle to any occupation, and in 1841 he joined the whaler Acushnet, and was away for four years. He jumped ship in the Marquesas with his friend, Troy, and lived among the islanders. On his return, his accounts of their escapades won him instant success. In 1847, now established as a popular author, he married Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of a wealthy Bostonian judge.

Parini’s version of Lizzie is an intelligent woman, but quite out of her depth emotionally and intellectually with the mercurial genius that she married. Herman Melville was a nightmare as a husband. The books that followed his ones on the South Sea Islands were financial disasters, and he was unable to provide for his wife and children. He took to drink and was dirty and ill-kempt. He was prone to sudden bursts of temper and, in this version, knocked his wife about.

Circumstances improved temporarily when the family moved to a remote village in the Berkshire Hills. Here Melville met his friend and mentor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who encouraged him to add metaphysical depths to the whale-hunting story that he was writing in the hope of restoring his fortunes. Instead, the project acquired the gravitas of Shakespearean tragedy, totally baffling its contemporary readers, and was only hailed as a masterpiece in the 1920s, some 30 years after Melville’s death.

It is generally accepted that Melville embroidered his descriptions of his adventures in the South Seas, but because it made a good story, nobody minds. This is rather different from Parini’s project.

Parini believes Melville was a repressed homosexual, and this thesis distorts his view of Melville’s life. Moreover, his glib explanations of the relations between Melville’s life and his work have the effect of trivialising the work and diminishing Melville’s achievements. In seeking to bring Melville the man alive, he has lost sight of Melville the literary genius.