Herman Melville, the customs inspector who had already written the great American novel

Herman Melville

Photo: Unknown photographer / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 1, 1819 Manhattan
Died	September 28, 1891 (72)
Occupation	Teacher
Awards	National Book Award for Nonfiction

For nineteen years, a bearded inspector walked the piers of Manhattan checking the cargo of ships that came in from ports he had once seen from a masthead. His colleagues at the New York Custom House knew him as an honest man in an office notorious for bribes. Few of them knew that the same man had written a novel about a captain on an ivory leg who chases a white whale around the planet, or that the book had failed so badly its author had given up trying to live by the pen. Herman Melville did not live to see Moby-Dick become the book American literature measures itself against. He died believing, with some reason, that the public had stopped listening to him.

That gap between the writer and his reception is the drama of his life. Melville was a bestselling author at twenty-six, the young sailor who claimed to have lived among cannibals in the South Seas, and a commercial ruin by thirty-three, after he tried to write the books he actually wanted to write. The twentieth century rescued him so thoroughly that it is now hard to picture a time when Moby-Dick was a flop. This year, as the novel marks a round-number anniversary, a Folio Society readers’ poll named it the greatest American novel. The man who wrote it spent his last years printing poems in editions of twenty-five copies for family and friends.

A merchant’s son and a family ruin

Melville was born in New York City on August 1, 1819, the third of eight children of Allan Melvill, a commission merchant who imported French dry goods, and Maria Gansevoort, the daughter of an old Dutch family from Albany. Both grandfathers had fought in the Revolution: Major Thomas Melvill took part in the Boston Tea Party, and General Peter Gansevoort commanded the defense of Fort Stanwix in 1777. Melville later spoke with some pride of his “double revolutionary descent”.

The comfort did not last. Allan lived on borrowed money from both families, and by 1830, when the Gansevoorts stopped lending, he owed them more than twenty thousand dollars. He moved the household to Albany and tried the fur trade. Herman spent a year at the Albany Academy before the fees became too much. In January 1832, after a winter journey in an open carriage, his father fell into a fever and delirium and died within weeks. The boy was twelve and likely watched the whole decline; two decades later he would write a similar deathbed into Pierre. The widow turned to the Calvinism of the Dutch Reformed Church, and the family eventually added a final “e” to its name.

What followed was a patchwork adolescence. An uncle found Herman a job as a bank clerk at 150 dollars a year. He worked in his older brother Gansevoort’s cap and fur store, took classes when money allowed, taught in country schools and joined debating societies in an effort to make up for the education he had lost. In 1839 he published his first known prose, a pair of florid sketches called “Fragments from a Writing Desk”, in a newspaper in Lansingburgh, New York, under the initials L.A.V.

Four years at sea

That same summer he signed aboard the merchant ship St. Lawrence as a green hand, bound for Liverpool. The poverty he saw in the English port went straight into Redburn ten years later. Back home, he taught at a school that never paid him and travelled to Illinois looking for work that did not exist. On Christmas Day 1840 he signed on to the new whaler Acushnet out of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, for a one-175th share of whatever the voyage earned. The ship sailed on January 3, 1841.

The Pacific supplied everything he would write for a decade. Off the coast of South America the crew met another whaler, and a young sailor named William Henry Chase gave Melville a copy of his father Owen Chase’s account of the Essex, the Nantucket ship rammed and sunk by a sperm whale in 1820. Melville later wrote that reading “this wondrous story upon the landless sea” had a surprising effect on him. Stories were already circulating about Mocha Dick, an albino sperm whale said to have fought off dozens of boats. Both ideas would wait nine years for their book.

In the summer of 1842, at Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas, Melville and a shipmate, Richard Tobias Greene, deserted and spent several weeks in or near the Taipi valley. He left on an Australian whaler, the Lucy Ann, took part in a mutiny off Tahiti, was briefly held in a local jail, drifted around Moorea as a beachcomber, shipped out on another whaler and was discharged in Hawaii. In August 1843 he enlisted as an ordinary seaman on the frigate United States and came home to Boston in October 1844. The navy gave him White-Jacket, a book whose account of flogging on board joined a wider campaign against the practice in the American fleet.

The man who lived among the cannibals

His family urged him to write the stories down. Typee, published in London by John Murray in February 1846 through his brother Gansevoort’s efforts, and in New York a month later, became an overnight bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. It mixed adventure, ethnography and a sharp critique of missionaries, and it probably stretched a stay of weeks into something closer to months. Nathaniel Hawthorne, still unknown to him, reviewed it anonymously and praised its “freedom of view”. The sequel, Omoo, followed in 1847. Melville enjoyed the fame and dreaded it; he complained he would “go down to posterity” as a “man who lived among the cannibals”.

On August 4, 1847, he married Elizabeth Shaw, known as Lizzie, the daughter of Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice of Massachusetts and an old friend of his father. Shaw would become the financial backstop of Melville’s entire career. The couple had four children: Malcolm, Stanwix, Elizabeth and Frances.

The trouble started with the third book. Mardi, in 1849, began as another South Seas adventure and turned into a sprawling philosophical allegory that readers did not want. Melville answered with two quick, saleable books, Redburn and White-Jacket, which he described to his father-in-law as “two jobs, which I have done for money, being forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood”. He was learning what the market would pay for, and resenting it.

Hawthorne, Arrowhead and the whale

In May 1850 he told the writer Richard Henry Dana Jr. that he was “half way” through a whaling book. Then two things changed the plan. He read Shakespeare and Thomas Carlyle with new hunger, and in August, at a gathering of writers in the Berkshires, he met Hawthorne, fifteen years his senior. The two sheltered together from a rainstorm during a picnic and talked for hours. Within days Melville wrote “Hawthorne and His Mosses”, an essay that compares the older writer to Shakespeare and reads now like a manifesto for the book he was about to write. That autumn he borrowed three thousand dollars from Judge Shaw and bought a 160-acre farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which he called Arrowhead. From his study he could see Mount Greylock, and he rebuilt the whaling story there into something far stranger.

The result appeared in London on October 18, 1851, as The Whale, in three volumes and without its epilogue, so British readers met a narrator who seemed to have drowned with everyone else. The American edition, Moby-Dick, followed on November 14, dedicated to Hawthorne “in token of my admiration for his genius”. It is a novel that will not stay inside a genre: a sea story, a treatise on whales, a stage tragedy with soliloquies, a comedy of shipboard friendship between Ishmael and the harpooner Queequeg, and an argument with God conducted through Captain Ahab. Melville told Hawthorne, “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.” Hawthorne, for his part, told a friend: “What a book Melville has written!”

The public was less sure. The American edition sold about fifteen hundred copies in its first eleven days and fewer than three hundred the following year. Richard Bentley, the London publisher, recovered only half of the advance he had paid. Reviews ranged from admiring to baffled.

Crazy, according to the papers

Melville’s next move turned disappointment into disaster. Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, in 1852, was sold to his publisher as a romance and delivered as a dark psychological novel with incestuous undercurrents that also mocked the literary world. The New York Day Book ran an item headlined “HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY”. His next manuscript, a story about a deserted wife called The Isle of the Cross, was never published and is lost. In December 1853 a fire at the Harper & Brothers warehouse in New York destroyed much of the unsold stock of his books.

He adapted by writing for magazines, and the pay-by-the-page years produced some of his finest work. Between 1853 and 1856 he published fourteen tales and sketches, among them “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, about a Wall Street copyist who answers every request with “I would prefer not to”, and Benito Cereno, the story of a slave revolt aboard a Spanish ship that an American captain cannot see even when it is in front of him. Several were gathered in The Piazza Tales in 1856. The Confidence-Man, a satire set on a Mississippi steamboat full of swindlers, appeared on April 1, 1857, April Fools’ Day, and was the last novel he published in his lifetime.

Worried about his health, Judge Shaw paid for a long journey to Europe and the Mediterranean. In November 1856 Melville spent three days with Hawthorne, then American consul in Liverpool, and the two walked among the sand dunes at Southport. Hawthorne wrote in his notebook that his friend “can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief”. The trip continued to Constantinople, Egypt and the Holy Land, and seeded the longest poem Melville would ever write.

The inspector years

A few seasons of lecturing on statues in Rome and on the South Seas did not pay. In 1863 the family sold Arrowhead and moved to a house at 104 East 26th Street in Manhattan, where Melville would live for the rest of his life. His first book of poems, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, a searching verse record of the Civil War, came out in 1866; of 1,260 copies printed, 551 sold. That December he took a post as a customs inspector for the city of New York. He held it for nineteen years, with a reputation for refusing the kickbacks that were routine in the service, and, without ever knowing it, at times under the protection of a future president, Chester A. Arthur, who admired his books.

This is also where the life gets hardest to romanticise. In 1867 Malcolm, the Melvilles’ eldest son, was found dead in his bedroom at eighteen from a gunshot, perhaps suicide, perhaps accident. That same year Lizzie’s family, fearful for Melville’s sanity, drew up a plan for her to leave him by claiming in a Boston court that he was insane. She refused. His biographer Laurie Robertson-Lorant suggests that in these years he could behave at home like the tyrannical captains of his fiction, possibly striking his wife after drinking; the evidence is indirect, and scholars still argue about how much weight it can bear. Stanwix, the second son, drifted from job to job and died of tuberculosis in San Francisco in 1886, aged thirty-six.

Melville kept writing anyway. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, published in 1876, runs to some 18,000 lines, one of the longest poems in American literature, about a young divinity student searching for faith in Jerusalem; one of its characters, the reserved Vine, is widely read as a portrait of Hawthorne. An uncle’s bequest paid for 350 copies. They did not sell, and the remainder was destroyed. Decades later the critic Lewis Mumford found a copy in the New York Public Library with its pages still uncut. After legacies from Lizzie’s relatives allowed him to retire at the end of 1885, Melville printed two slim volumes of sea poems, John Marr and Other Sailors and Timoleon, in runs of twenty-five copies each.

He died at home on September 28, 1891, of what the certificate called cardiac dilation, and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. The first notice in The New York Times misspelled his masterpiece as “Mobie Dick”.

The rescue, and what it got wrong

Lizzie found among his papers an unfinished novella about a handsome young sailor hanged for striking an officer who has falsely accused him. The pages sat in the family’s breadbox until 1919, when Melville’s granddaughter showed them to a young Columbia scholar, Raymond Weaver. His biography Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic, published in 1921, and his edition of Billy Budd in 1924 were central to what became known as the Melville revival, alongside Carl Van Doren’s criticism, D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature and Lewis Mumford’s biography. Billy Budd went on to become a Broadway play, an opera by Benjamin Britten and a film directed by Peter Ustinov.

The revival also built a myth, and it deserves some scepticism. The first rescuers read the novels as autobiography, took Typee at its word and painted Melville as a genius who fell silent after the world rejected him. Later scholars, starting with Jay Leyda’s day-by-day The Melville Log in 1951, showed a different arc: a writer who never stopped working, who deliberately chose poetry over fiction, and who was not entirely forgotten; the “Mobie Dick” misprint was followed days later by a respectful appreciation in the same newspaper. Even the famous friendship with Hawthorne has been stretched to fit every theory, from spiritual kinship to unrequited love, on the evidence of a handful of Melville’s letters, while Hawthorne’s side of the correspondence is lost. What survives is more interesting than the legend: a working writer who refused to repeat his early success and paid for it in money, reputation and family peace.

A book that keeps being reread

By the middle of the twentieth century the white whale belonged to everyone. John Huston filmed Moby Dick in 1956 with Gregory Peck as Ahab and a screenplay co-written by Ray Bradbury. Jake Heggie turned it into an opera in 2010, and Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea told the Essex story with Ben Whishaw playing a young Melville. The Library of America published his collected works, the United States Postal Service put him on a stamp in 1984, and in 2010 paleontologists named an extinct giant sperm whale Livyatan melvillei in his honour. The corner of Park Avenue South and East 26th Street, where he wrote Billy Budd, is Herman Melville Square.

The 175th anniversary has given all of that a new push. The Folio Society marked it with a limited illustrated edition of Moby-Dick, introduced by the critic Michael Dirda and illustrated by the artist Mu Pan, after its readers chose the novel as the greatest American novel with 1,281 of 4,823 votes. In Pittsfield, the Berkshire County Historical Society held its tenth Moby-Dick read-a-thon at Arrowhead this summer, reading the book aloud in the house where it was written, and November 14 will mark 175 years since the first American edition.

What keeps bringing readers back is not the whale. It is the voice that opens with “Call me Ishmael” and then refuses to settle into a single kind of book, and the stubbornness of a man who went on writing when almost nobody was reading. Bartleby’s polite refusal has become a slogan for anyone resisting pointless work; Ahab has become shorthand for every obsession that sinks the ship with it. Melville wrote them in a country that preferred his adventure stories. The country took seventy years to catch up, and it is still reading.

Tags: writers, American literature, Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener, Billy Budd, Moby-Dick

Featured News — Herman Melville

Authors

Cormac McCarthy, Author of ‘The Road’ and ‘No Country for Old Men’

Books

The Unending Chase: Why Moby Dick Still Sails Our Literary Seas

Movies

‘The Whale’ (2022) Movie Review: The Excellent Movie That For Sure You Will Not Feel Like Watching At All

See all →

Related People

Mark Twain

John Grisham

George Orwell

Edgar Allan Poe

John Banville

Raymond Chandler