• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 7351 0

Herman was born in 1819 the family began a rapid ascent. Within two years they were ensconced in finer accommodations on Courtlandt Street, along with a housekeeper, cook, nurse, and waiter. In 1824 they climbed farther up-island to 33 Bleecker, whose proximity to “our Stylish Neighbours in Bond Street” delighted Maria. In 1828 the Melvills reached the pinnacle, a spacious house on Broadway, between Great Jones and Bond Street itself. Along the way, Maria gave her children the skills and graces appropriate to their would-be station. She taught them etiquette herself and sent Herman and his elder brother, Gansevoort, to the New-York Male High School, Mrs. Whieldon’s dancing school, and the prestigious Columbia Grammar School, attended by pupils from the finest families.

Then catastrophe struck. Hard-pressed to compete with New York’s auctioneers, and dangerously overextended, Allan entered secretly into a speculative scheme that went sour. Maria’s wealthy brother reluctantly bailed him out, but Melvill was soon on the skids again, sliding toward an 1830 bankruptcy. The family fled to Albany, where they lived, humiliatingly, on the charity of relatives and where Allan, broken, died in 1832. Maria, hoping to give her children a fresh start, added an aristocratic e to their name, and for a time it seemed Gansevoort would make a go of his fur-and-cap business. But the Panic of 1837 wiped him out, plunging the Melvilles into indigence.

With the depression dragging on, Herman shipped out in 1839 as cabin boy on a square-rigger to Liverpool. In 1841 he signed up for a four-year cruise on a “blubberhunter” but jumped ship in the Marquesas, drifted about the South Pacific for a year, then returned and wrote up his recent adventures in a narrative that he submitted to Harpers. The firm turned him down, believing the tale untrue, but after his brother Gansevoort sold the work to an English company, Wiley and Putnam brought it out in New York, published, under the direction of Evert Duyckinck, as Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846).

Melville’s “peep” proved popular. His account of swimming nude with savage damsels was titillating yet not vulgar. His favorable comparison of Polynesian women’s free and uncomplicated sexuality to the “stiffness, formality and affectation” of Victorian ladies back home struck a chord. So did his sympathy for the South Sea natives, whom arrogant American missionaries had “evangelised into beasts of burden.” Irate religious papers assailed the sailor-author, but Margaret Fuller reviewed Typee favorably for the Tribune, and Harpers grabbed his next book—Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas—which came out in 1847 to good reviews and further fierce attacks.

Now a celebrated author, Melville moved to New York City with his new bride, Elizabeth Shaw. Pooling resources with his lawyer-brother, Allan, they bought a brownstone on Fourth Avenue, just behind Grace Church, a short walk to Barnum’s Museum and Astor House and a few blocks away from Duyckinck. The critic championed Melville against the religious press (an Episcopalian, Duyckinck had little sympathy for Methodist evangelists) and became his patron and mentor, inducting him into the ranks of Young America and guiding him into literary society.

Melville thrived in New York. Salon hostesses sought him out much as they had Poe. He read voraciously, borrowing from the New York Society Library and burrowing happily in Duyckinck’s massive book collection. He loved Duyckinck’s Saturday night suppers, where the Young America set debated literature, democracy, philosophy, and art over brandy and cigars. Embracing their cultural program, he rejected the Knicker-bocker gentry (as had Poe) and luxuriated in metropolitan sensations (as he was sure the Bard would have: “I would to God Shakspeare [sic] had lived later,” he wrote Duyckinck in 1849, “ & promenaded in Broadway”).

He wasn’t making much money, however, a situation that worsened after his next book, Mardi, departed from his established format and turned off reviewers and readers alike.