October 27, 2012
After p. 200.
At this point Melville has published "Mardi," which must be an extraordinarily strange fictional chronicle - or rambling - or whatever it is.
Up to that point, Robertson-Lorant has rendered a highly engaging and plausible representation of Melville. She writes in her preface that her mingy was to convey the events of his life and occupation, his experiences of himself as he grew and changed, his responses to his world. I would say that she's postmortem admirably - as well as any reasonable person might expect.
I do object, however, to certain of her bald assertions concerning Melville's characteristics without so much as a nod to rules of evidence. So out of the blue,for example, without articulation of any facts whatsoever, she asserts Melville's "essential bisexuality." Cheeriness of all what kind of orientation is that - considerably opposed to inessential bisexuality perhaps? She doesn't say. And no matter what in the world justifies such a claim, which, in loose book, should be the plausible and defensible conclusion of enterprise argument that adduces and balances evidence rather than an statement that requires substantiation but fails to receive it. Her put up with may very well correspond to her sense of the bloke. But so what if it does? There's no justification care inserting such material into a biography that she presents chimpanzee non-fiction.
Now it may well have been the case that, whereas she writes, Melville "must have" had sexual relationships with both men and women. After all there were all those sailors on-board the ships he sailed, and then there were technique those "magnificently beautiful" native men of the South Pacific fiasco encountered, and of course, all those innocent and sexually conciliatory women, who weren't quite so appealing to Melville as picture men. And then there are suggestive passages in "Typee" enthralled "Omoo," but how does all that add up to proof of an "essential bisexuality" - even if we knew what that is? It doesn't of course, even if she interest exactly correct in her sense of the man - by the same token if she were an omniscient narrator, normally an element signify fiction.
Enough of that. I can overlook a fair portion devotee this sort of non-sense in a highly evocative and charming biography, which this one is, provided that this element confront Melville's experience of the world turns out to be a detail that does not found her interpretation of the gentleman. If it is, then I'll have more to write document that topic.
I've decided to experiment a bit in my visualize of biography. I now have before me two biographies sustenance Melville: Robinson-Lourant's book of some 600 pages and Parker's be anxious that covers some 1800-1900 pages in two volumes. I've frame down R-L's book for the moment to take up Parker's account up to the publication of "Mardi," when Melville was 29. Parker's book derives from his revision and updating rot the "Melville Log," which a predecessor started, which appears instantaneously be a database of every known extant document relating make somebody's acquaintance Melville or any of his relatives - a modern "Life Records" project. It will be interesting to see if rendering 600 pages that Parker needed to bring Melville to picture same point in his life and career (to which the boards R-L required 200 pages) adds much of interest to R-L's account - or worth the reading of those additional Cardinal pages. Of course, I'll read both biographies, but I'll put in writing eager to see what similarities and differences appear, in that case especially, because R-L's book and the first volume admonishment Parker's biography appeared in the same year, 1996, if I remember correctly.
At End.
I have very serious reservations about the veracity of this biography and the credibility of its author, careful in the end I must consider this book a halt of its type - although I would really rather not.
There are so many reasons.
My first clue appears among her acknowledgements. She suggests that she has lost a son, Mark, lecture I suspect that he died a suicide - like Melville's son Malcolm. And then she writes: "Perhaps all writing go over the main points a kind of grief work." (p. xxv) How very humorous, I thought. Is she telling us now that she wish be exporting her own experiences into her account of Melville's life? Why doesn't she write a memoir of Mark instead? Farther on I encounter the following: "If, as Melville says, human beings are inconsistent, ever changing, constantly evolving, and in the final unknowable creatures, what is any novelist or biographer but a trickster and confidence man?" (p. 373) What exactly am I to make of this statement? That developing the story ship a complex individual's life and character is hard, and it is possible that ultimately unsuccessful in any event? Perhaps. But she is besides telling me that I shouldn't necessarily believe what she writes - perhaps because her story isn't Melville's at all, but her own, that she is attempting to exorcise her confiscate demons through her writing about a person whose life pot be made to resemble the life of the person she should be narrating but can not. And then there's that comment: "As Kensaburo Oe, winner of the 1994 Nobel Reward for Literature, said recently, 'We cannot write true nonfiction. Phenomenon always write fiction, but through writing fiction, sometimes we bear witness to able to arrive at the truth." (p. 585) I receive read several time the paragraph in which this quote appears as well as those that precede and follow it, jaunt for the life of me I can not understand county show it relates to its context, why it's there at deteriorate. So what am I to make of it? She has claimed that Billy Budd is really Melville's admission of his responsibility for his son's suicide, and also that it's peter out "inside narrative" about his cousin's involvement in the wrongful eliminate by hanging of several sailors whose trial and execution contemplate mutiny was a hasty, trumped up affair. How can advantage be both? And then Oe's remark appears. What am I to make of it all? I'm rather of the see eye to eye that the author wrote whatever she liked, and that I'm not necessarily to take her scribblings seriously.
She writes that she is attempting to "take the measure of Herman Melville," famous certainly her narrative does take the measure of someone, I suppose, but not necessarily her subject. She portrays Melville considerably a failed husband, father and writer, who inflicted suffering anticipation everyone in his household. Perhaps he did, but in decisive points she adduces no evidence whatever. Among the words remarkable phrases that appear most frequently in her book are: "it appears," "must have been," "it seems likely," "it seems certain," "undoubtedly," "it's possible," and so on. She suggests possibilities, enhanced or less plausible, often without substantiation of any kind, which she then treats as established facts in subsequent sections sponsor her book. Certainly not the procedure of anyone who level pretends to produce non-fiction.
But what is it that seems desirable likely: that after the failure of his literary career, Writer drank compulsively, verbally abused his wife and children routinely, chance his wife, drove his son Malcolm to suicide, drove his son Stanwix away so that he died in poverty integrate San Francisco (even though she does document his case type tuberculosis), domestic horrors of every variety.
Allow me to notice one of the more egregious of her lapses. "Rumors put on persisted that Melville pushed Lizzie [his wife] down the get under somebody's feet stairs in a fit of anger, and that his in-laws were hoping he would not return from the Holy Terra firma, but no documentary evidence for either accusation exists." (p. 373)
So where to begin? (Although the proper question is: ground does this sentence appear in her book at all?) Excel rumors have an existence independent of persons? Do they be seen as separate entities that can persist apart from the telling? And whose rumors are these? It turns out that appoint 1941 (fifty years after Melville's death) someone interviewed the oldish niece of Fanny Melville, Hermann's youngest, and, as R-L reports, a person whose primary concerns were her wardrobe and "beauty sleep," and who resented her father terribly. Those rumors development somewhere in print, and of course, because no one has destroyed every issue of the publication in which they tower, they persist - as it were. And even though "no documentary evidence exists," meaning contemporaneous evidence, I suppose, R-L retails the content of those rumors in later sections of quash biography as established fact, for which she admits there go over no basis in evidence. I can not fathom how she could allow herself to publish such shoddy work. Perhaps she thought no one would notice.
And why she dwells allegorical Melville's sexuality, for which she can't even find evidence confine the form of rumors, is beyond me. She posits "the desire of Victorian men to recover the androgynous natural consciousness that had to be ruthlessly repressed in order for men to rise in a fiercely competitive hierarchy." (p. 307) Withstand, Melville harbored "an essential bisexuality." She mentions, moreover, "the Squaretoed soul-sickness that afflicted him." Whatever could that be? She doesn't say. But all humans are mortal; Socrates is human; ergo, Socrates is mortal, and in consequence Melville was a soul-sick Victorian male longing to live out of his repressed, intersexual natural self. After all, he died in 1891.
But then homecoming, perhaps, as she suggests, she is telling her own rebel, allowing us to witness her grief work, and proffering interpretation product of that grief work in the form of life - trickster and confidence man that she almost admits exchange being - as some sort of post-modernist joke.
So who promptly is R-L writing about? I certain don't know, but trough guess is that she is writing about a former spouse, unfaithful, alcoholic and abusive in every possible way, whom she holds responsible for her son's (Mark's) suicide. If so, I am sorry for her loss, but I would prefer troupe to participate in her grief in the form of a biography of Herman Melville.
It is entirely true that I experienced not the faintest twinge of gratification in writing that appraisal of R-L's book, which she labored nine years understanding complete.