Melville in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates ed. by Steven Olsen-Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: Melville in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates ed. by Steven Olsen-Smith Wyn Kelley Steven Olsen-Smith, ed. Melville in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates Foreword by John Bryant. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015. l + 205 pp. Steven Olsen-Smith’s book renews hope that discoveries about Melville await us in years to come: not just in papers and collections we have not considered before but in tools that make new readings possible. As General Editor of Melville’s Marginalia Online, Olsen-Smith has pioneered innovative uses of imaging technology to recover lost or fugitive manuscripts. Because of his scholarship, we no longer stop at the blank wall of an erasure or at an explosion of inky lines and blots. That crossed-out comment in Evert Duyckinck’s diary? The one that says Melville is “cheerful company [three lines inked over:] without being very fluent or original and models his writing evidently a great deal on Washington Irving” (29–30)? Fully exposed in the light of Olsen-Smith’s editorial laser beam. In this book, however, Olsen-Smith necessarily exhibits less of the technological wizardry of his Melville’s Marginalia Online editing and more of the interpretive confidence and brilliance that have grown out of that work. For here he assembles published materials as well as manuscripts, new names as well as familiar ones, and also full transcriptions with even fuller contexts: the complete Albany Microscope correspondence of the Philo Logos Society, with new confirmation by William Moses in 1858; multiple accounts of the Monument Mountain climbs of 1850 and 1851 by Cornelius Mathews (1850), Evert Duyckinck (1850 and 1851), Sarah Huyler Morewood (1852), James T. Fields (1862), and Henry Dwight Sedgwick II (1895), reflecting on each other with various cross-lights; overlapping and often conflicting accounts of the Berkshire years by Nathaniel, Sophia, and Julian Hawthorne; and appraisals of Melville’s writing and character starting in the 1850s and continuing for more than a century. Olsen-Smith’s headnotes emphasize that many of these materials appear for the first time in their entirety, with new transcriptions by him or by Hershel Parker (for the New Melville Log), or with new research that [End Page 108] establishes their significance. Many have appeared in biographies before, with the biographer’s narrative to frame them. But in his emphasis on “testimony by individuals who personally knew or encountered Melville, or who conveyed testimony by such individuals” (xxxii), Olsen-Smith also directs the spotlight to materials that might not previously have met a biographer’s standards of accuracy: for example, early accounts of Melville’s life by the Duyckinck brothers, Charles Hemstreet, Theodore Wolfe, J. E. A. Smith, and others who circulated popular myths and falsehoods, including the almost universal belief that Melville’s sea novels were strictly autobiographical. With such fidelity to Melville’s witnesses, rather than to scholars, biographers, or (except for a handful of intimates) even close friends, Olsen-Smith runs risks: one of redundancy, or the piling up of multiple, possibly unedifying, descriptions of the same obvious features of Melville’s life; and another of incompleteness, in that witnesses caught noticing Melville lack the insight of trained biographers and informed readers. Indeed, this book is filled with splendid redundancy and glorious incompleteness, crammed with sometimes hasty or uninformed judgments. In that sense it provides a fresh and wondrous view of someone who was not yet, nor always, remarkable. In the very care and accuracy with which Olsen-Smith edits and assembles his materials, he avoids creating the coherent study of Melville that many readers crave. Instead he invites readers to reconsider multiple vexed questions about Melville the man and writer. Perhaps the knottiest of these questions concerns Melville’s reputed decline into depression, alcoholism, violence, insanity, or simply irrelevance. In some ways the book seems to be structured around the problem of Melville’s moods—Jolly Melville or Grouchy Melville or Timid and Nervous Melville. Questions abound. In youth, was he fearless, energetic, abundant with...