The Melville Revival, which started in 1919, is the process of rediscovering Melville and Moby-Dick in particular. A few remarks on his career's decline are necessary before we proceed, though. First, Melville had great popularity with Typee (1846), his debut book, which was based on his own experience fleeing the Acushnet whaling ship and residing on the Marquesan island of Nuku Hiva. With over 16,000 copies sold during his lifetime.
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| Photo by Michal Wozniak on Unsplash |
Typee was by far his most popular album. Because of the exotic love affair in the narrative between the narrator, Tommo, and Fayaway, an inhabitant of the mythical country of the same name, Melville gained notoriety as the "guy who lived among the cannibals" and even turned into a sort of 19th-century sex symbol.
His subsequent books continued to draw directly from his own life. The follow-up to Typee, Omoo, was based on his adventures leaving Nuku Hiva aboard the Lucy Ann whaling ship and participating in a mutiny (for which he was imprisoned in Tahiti); Redburn was based on his initial sea experiences on a commercial ship sailing to Liverpool; and so forth.
However, each was more or less worse than the previous one, and by the time he wrote Moby-Dick, he was in very bad financial shape and had to borrow money from many family members to survive. He dedicated Moby-Dick to Nathaniel Hawthorne and used some of this money to buy a home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, close to his literary hero. He then holed up in his study to write Moby-Dick.
As noted, Moby-Dick was a financial flop when it was first in 1851 and was really his least popular book up to that point in terms of sales. Although it garnered mostly positive reviews, a large portion of the public occasionally seemed perplexed, morally outraged, and/or appalled by the film's clearly obscene subject matter. Its first printing in England, where it was released as "The Whale" in October 1851 before the American version, is another factor in this, albeit a minor one.
The epilogue chapter, in which Ishmael recounts how he escaped death and has thus been telling the story of the last 135 chapters, was mysteriously absent in the British edition, in addition to many scandalous passages of the book being redacted and/or omitted.
These early critics were understandably confused and enraged by the way he closed the book. Here is an early British critique from The Spectator that also criticizes how the book's narrator, Ishmael, gradually disappears and is replaced by an omniscient third-person Ishmael/Melville.
It is a canon with some critics that nothing should be introduced into a novel which it is physically impossible for the writer to have known: thus, he must not describe the conversation of miners in a pit if they all perish. Mr. Melville hardly steers clear of this rule, and he continually violates another, by beginning in the autobiographical form and changing ad libitum into the narrative. His catastrophe overrides all rule: not only is Ahab, with his boat's-crew, destroyed in his last desperate attack upon the white whale, but the Pequod herself sinks with all on board into the depths of the illimitable ocean. Such is the go-ahead method.
However, not all of the reviews for Moby-Dick were negative. "...in point of richness and variety of incident, originality of conception, and splendor of description, surpasses any of the previous products of this very successful author," the Harper's New Monthly Magazine review from December 1851 stated. He goes on:
On this slight framework, the author has constructed a romance, a tragedy, and a natural history, not without numerous gratuitous suggestions on psychology, ethics and theology. Beneath the whole story, the subtle, imaginative reader may perhaps find a pregnant allegory, intended to illustrate the mystery of human life. Certain it is that the rapid, pointed hints which are often thrown out, with the keenness and velocity of a harpoon, penetrate deep into the heart of things, showing that the genius of the author for moral analysis is scarcely surpassed by his wizard power of description.
Without going into too much detail about the book's early reviews, suffice it to say that they decried Moby-Dick as being "of the worst school of Bedlam fiction" due to its moral relativism, immorality, and general lack of cohesion (a common gripe to this day).
Nonetheless, it wasn't Moby-Dick that doomed his career as much as his following novel, Pierre, or the Ambiguities, a work of psychological, Gothic fiction that remains eerie to this day. Pierre's assessments were more mixed, with one notoriously headlined "HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY."
Melville wrote and published novels/novellas for a few more years, finishing with The Confidence-Man in 1857, and thereafter primarily composed poetry (with the exception of the unfinished Billy Budd, published posthumously). He worked as a customs inspector in New York City for the last 19 years of his career before retiring in 1885. He died in 1891, six years later. The title of his now-famous work, "Mobie Dick," was misspelled in the New York Times obituary.
Contrary to popular assumption, Melville was not completely forgotten in the late nineteenth century. There were even a few fans who contacted with him on a regular basis, and he maintained a modest fanbase, particularly in England. Even his fans realized how unknown he had become.
"The only wonder is that Melville is so little known and so little appreciated," a reviewer in the New York Critic said when Moby-Dick was reissued after his death in 1893. (If anyone is interested, these intervening years are well-documented in V.L.O. Chittick's article The Way Back to Melville: Sea-Chart of a Literary Revival in the Southwest Review.)
This is all a long-winded way of answering the fundamental question of how the Moby-Dick became a cultural juggernaut. The Melville Revival officially began in 1919, with Carl Van Doren, editor of The Nation magazine and one of those "Melville The Obscure" supporters. Van Doren wanted to commemorate Melville's 100th birthday in 1819, so he commissioned Raymond Weaver to compose an essay, which you can read here.
Moby-Dick is described as "an astounding masterwork" by Weaver, who also says that "if he does not finally rank as a writer of overshadowing accomplishment, it will be owed not to any lack of brilliance, but to the perversity of his rare and high skills." Weaver later released the first biography of Melville, and in 1924, a sixteen-volume edition of Melville's works was published as a result of readers returning to his writings.
There was a little bit of a retroactive vogue for his art in the 1920s. John Barrymore played the lead role in The Sea Beast, a silent movie that was partially based on Moby-Dick (remade in 1930 as Moby-Dick). There were also a few excellent press versions of his writings published in the 1920s, like this 1926 Nonesuch Press edition of Benito Cereno.
The recovery of Billy Budd, whose manuscript was discovered in a bread box by his granddaughter Elizabeth Melville Metcalf, was another high point of the Melville Revival. Metcalf offered Raymond Weaver the manuscript, and Weaver published it in 1924 to acclaim, entering it right away into the canon of American literature.
Another notable event was the 1930 release of the now-classic Moby-Dick edition by Lakeside Press, which featured more than 100 Rockwell Kent woodcut drawings. The prints, which Kent even took on tour him, generated their own cultural phenomena.
The ten-year-long Melville Revival served as a launching pad for Melville to become one of America's most well-known authors and one of its most renowned novels. There have been many versions of Moby-Dick, with the 1956 version starring Gregory Peck as Ahab possibly being the most popular. But even before that, Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd was a huge hit and is still performed frequently today.
The popularity of numerous film and theatrical versions, inclusion in high school and college curricula, and countless parodies from Loony Toons to The X-Files all played a part in how Moby-Dick became so ingrained in culture from the 1950s onward. The gist of the response is that it was Raymond Weaver, via Carl Van Doren and The Nation, but I'd like to think that Moby-Dick was just so far ahead of its time that it was intended to be rediscovered.
It was only a matter of time until the broader public was prepared, and the fact that it occurred in the 1920s amid the triumph of modernist authors like Woolf and Joyce that it foretold gives me even more reason to think that.
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