Critical Lives: Herman Melville by Kevin Hayes

Abstract

Reviewed by: Critical Lives: Herman Melville by Kevin Hayes Peter Riley Kevin Hayes Critical Lives: Herman Melville London, UK: Reaktion, 2017. x + 248 pp. In Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War (2015), Cody Marrs memorably describes the long career of Herman Melville as a historiographical "loose fish" that has often evaded conventional literary periodizations. Melville's transition and perceived decline, Marrs suggests, from prose to poetry in the 1850s and 1860s often maps a little too neatly onto the epochal shift between ante- and postbellum eras. In fact, this standard binary conception of the nineteenth century—often unable to think in terms of a "transbellum" American literary history—has had the effect of framing and reinforcing the later Melville as fundamentally out of place and time: a largely redundant antebellum figure who, left behind by the age, tragically turns inward towards the private solace offered by verse and coterie publication. Despite the many excellent facets of Kevin Hayes's new and eminently readable short biography, the Melville that emerges here does fall off something of a postbellum cliff. Hayes devotes a total of twenty-one pages to the last thirty years of Melville's life. This brevity has the effect of defying the critical trend that has lately seen Melville-as-poet come to the fore in fascinating and generative ways. What we get instead is Melville the "Modern Ossian," the familiar icon of frustrated authorship, who after reaching the heights of Moby-Dick suffers that ultimate ignominy of having to get a day job and who revives from his retirement torpor just enough to produce the final, transcendent Billy Budd. In other words, Hayes has produced a curiously uneven and diptych-like account of Melville's life that magnifies or diminishes the significance of particular events depending on where they are located on the graph of Melville's career trajectory. So, on the one hand, he is at pains to describe (at length) a game that early Melville might have played at high school and how, in "a vague and inchoate way," this pastime "gave Herman an inkling of the narrative possibilities of a chase" (29); on the other, he dismisses too quickly the late Melville's choice of tetrameter for Clarel as "reactionary" (170). This unevenness was no [End Page 103] doubt due in part to the restrictions imposed by the short biographical form and to our relative lack of information about Melville's later life, but still: those last thirty years—including the death of two sons and an epic poem—go by in what seems like the blink of an eye. That said, a few moments in the early chapters provide tantalizing glimpses of the later Melville's transbellum sensibility. It turns out that while writing "Bridegroom Dick" for inclusion in the 1888 John Marr and Other Sailors, Melville was thinking back to and celebrating his cousin Guert Gansevoort's role in the Mexican-American war. Such snapshots help secure a sense of continuity in an otherwise divided narrative design. This biographical narrative also attempts to revise perceptions of Melville's romantic attitudes. Hayes gives very little space to the homosocial or proto-queer Melville. At times refreshing, the absence can become distracting. Selecting a passage from a honeymooning Elizabeth Melville to her stepmother that describes the hotel they were staying at, Hayes enthuses, "[L]ook at the quality of Elizabeth's writing" and "[N]o wonder she fell for a writer and he for her" (80). The fact that their courtship correspondence does not survive is "a great loss to American literature" (80). Whereas this biography rehabilitates Melville's conjugal relations, it downplays the potential Hawthorne romance. It makes no mention of mournful Liverpool beaches or of the Agatha correspondence (or hand-squeezing or anything of Claggart's dark fascination with Billy, though we do take in the trip Hawthorne and Melville made to Chester). Melville's arrival at Nukahiva, on the other hand, receives a fair amount of attention, and Hayes makes sure to remind us of Tommo's abhorrence at witnessing the crew's landing: "Not the feeblest barrier was interposed between the unholy passions of the crew and their...