Books: Lies-cu/n-Art

MELVILLE IN THE SOUTH SEAS—Charles Roberts Anderson—Columbia University Press ($4.50).

Since 1919—the Herman Melville centennial—the “Melville Revival” has provoked several biographies, some 500 essays, a flood of new Melville editions (54 U. S. and English editions of Moby Dick alone), and a consuming curiosity about Melville’s scantily documented life. Biographers’ main source material has been Melville’s “autobiographical” novels. From these comes the portrait of the brooding, misanthropic philosopher and mystic, who went to sea in flight from suicide, won brief success with his South Seas romances (Typee, Omoo, et a/.) and Moby Dick, died a forgotten man after 20 bitter last years as a New York customs clerk.

Melville in the South Seas, the result of six years’ sleuthing by a Duke University professor, is a 522-page argument that Melville’s books are far from autobiographical, that Melville’s South Seas period (1841-1845)—source of his most lasting books—was far more joyous than he later made out. Melville’s turn to allegory, he says, was a literary mistake, aided and abetted by Boston and Manhattan intellectuals. Hawthorne, who used to lie in the hay talking with Melville about time and destiny, characterized Melville’s metaphysics as enough to “compel a man to swim for his life.”

Adventure and romance, not flight from suicide, says Author Anderson, was the aim of the swarthy, 21-year-old ex-clerk-farmer-teacher who signed on the Acushnet (“Pequod”) at New Bedford one winter day in 1840. Other travelers’ accounts (which he shrewdly disparaged) furnished the main basis for the “unvarnished truth” of his South Seas experiences—captivity by Typee tribesmen, cannibalism, “care-killing damsels,” Queen Moana’s erotic tattooing, the many other wonders which took mid-Victorian readers’ breath away.

An example of Melville’s romancing is his account, in White-Jacket, of falling overboard on his 14-month voyage home on the frigate United States. Probably one of the most vivid escapes from death in literature, it is the scene which prompted Biographer Lewis Mumford to observe that Melville had now “faced life and death, not as abstractions, but as concrete events. . . .” But Melville never fell overboard in his life. Says Author Anderson: Melville suffered this vicarious experience in an account by a seaman who fell overboard from the frigate United States 18 years before.

Author Anderson pretty well clinches his proof that Melville wrote fiction. All his hammering does not chip an inch off Melville’s stature as one of the major figures of U. S. letters.