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In the face of such constraints, Delbanco has chosen to offer not so much a biography of Melville the man as a life study of the language he used in his efforts to seize what Moby Dick calls "the ungraspable phantom of life." Throughout the book, Delbanco judiciously balances a fascination with Melville's "spontaneous and self-surprising" language with a deep concern for the "complex connections" between his writing and the "intellectual and political context in which he lived and worked."
In Melville's case, personal life was to have an uncanny fit with political context for much of his career. As a young adult in 1841, he set out from New Bedford, Massachusetts in a whaling vessel bound for the killing fields of the Pacific. Already weary of the "soul-killing business" of office work, he was itching to see the world, and in his inquisitive restlessness, he mirrored the larger culture of the 1840s. For America this was an age of swagger and expansion, as settlers relentlessly drove across its vast prairies, mountains, and deserts to its western shores.
Midway on their whaling voyage, Melville and a fellow sailor jumped ship in the South Pacific. Out of their escapades he fashioned his first novel, Typee, which proved to be a modest but genuine success. Three similar works quickly followed at the rate of one a year, and in the midst of these heady and productive days, Melville found enough time to court and wed Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, to begin raising a family with her, and to settle into life in New York City.
Though he had yet to write the works for which he is remembered, Melville's reputation in 1850 was as high as it would ever be in his lifetime. In the following decade, his professional and personal decline proved to be as precipitous as his nation's parallel descent into political stalemate and civil war. In the body politic, the decade opened with the passage of the calamitous Fugitive Slaw Law, and over the course of the next ten years, writes Delbanco, "the American political system went to pieces before Melville's eyes." As the author grappled with spiritual depression, literary failure, and the prospect of financial ruin, he at the same time found America's political leadership behaving like "a ship of political fools sailing headlong for disaster."
With nuanced and astute readings of "Bartleby, the Scrivener," Benito Cereno, and the incomparable Moby Dick, Delbanco draws out the political significance of the brilliant short stories and novels Melville produced amid this national turmoil and personal stress. He details how the author brooded upon a world in which the abominable reality of chattel slavery drove opposing factions on a course that was as fated in its inevitable outcome as it seemed reckless in its unpredictable course. With his own eye cast on the politics of our post-9/11 world, Delbanco notes that in the years leading up to the Civil War, Melville repeatedly assailed his nation's political culture for a "kind of moral opacity that seems still to afflict America as it lumbers through the world creating enemies whose enmity it does not begin to understand."
Melville: His World and Work deftly balances its assessment of the author's life among the weary Whigs and self-destructive Democrats of the 1850s with a vigorous account of the writer's blazing transformation from a middling teller of tales to a genius of world literature. Many factors figured in Melville's astonishing development in the early and mid-1850s. They included his bracing, revelatory encounter with the printed text of Shakespeare's plays ("if another Messiah ever comes twill be in Shakespeare's person," Melville wrote at the time), his remarkably intense and lamentably brief friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his full-scale immersion in the life of his adopted city of New York.
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