BOOKS
MELVILLE AND HIS CRITICS
HERMAN MELVILLE.
By
Newton Arvin. The American Men of LeHers
Series. William Sloane Associates. $3 .50.
This latest book on Melville is, to my mind, the finest critical
biography of an American author that we have had in a long time.
It
is
also the best book Newton Arvin has written; he transcends in it the
limitations of tone and method manifest in his works on Hawthorne and
Whitman. Here he is in complete possession of his subject and uninhibited
by ideological preconceptions. He treats text and context with equal
authority, combining in a masterly way the traditional resources of
literary criticism with a flexible and entirely apposite use of the insights
provided by the newer psychological disciplines. The result is a critical
interpretation so just and clear that it may well become the classic study
of Melville in our literature.
Melville has of late nearly eclipsed Henry James as the much-favored
object of critical inquiry. A few of the new studies devoted to him arc
welcome contributions to scholarship; but some of the others, in which
a critical approach is attempted, are of dubious value, since what is dis–
played in them is less insight into Melville than an addiction to the more
aberrant tendencies of the contemporary literary mind. There is the new
pedantry of myth, for instance, which is well on its way to converting a
valid though by no means inexhaustible cultural interest into a pretentious
and up-to-date version of the kind of source-and-parallel hunting now
rapidly going out of fashion in the more alert academic circles. That
there is a genuine mythic element in Melville is hardly open to doubt.
But the myth-happy critics blow it up to vast proportions, laboring
gratuitously, and in a mode of erudition peculiarly arid, to interpose be–
tween us and the reality of Melville a talmudic elaboration of mythology
portentous to the point of stupefaction.
Not quite so one-sided yet unsatisfactory on the whole is the tra–
ditionalist approach to Melville. The traditionalists make what they can
of him with their means, and their means are well adapted to eliminate
the major contradictions in him. But these contradictions are really of an
immitigable nature. At once creative and frustrating, agonisingly personal
yet deeply expressive of national and universal culture, they are at the
very core of Melville's modernity and the symbolic fate of his genius.
Now a Melville relieved of his contradictions is, of course, a Melville
