Herman Melville — A Profile of the Author of Moby Dick
Melville had to fight, fight against the existing world, against his own very self.” D.H. Lawrence
I’ve recently read Jay Parini’s excellent novel The Passages of Herman Melville, which sent me scurrying back to Van Wyck Brooks’ The Times of Melville & Whitman, an almost revolutionary volume first published in 1947, and where Brooks writes:
Herman Melville, as a little boy who dreamed of distant voyages, had delighted in the wharves and the warehouses and the shipping of New York, the yo-heave-ho of the seamen, the old anchors in the streets, but, descending the Hudson from Albany, with a dollar in his pocket, to sail himself, he had felt already somewhat defiant and embittered.
The family had moved to Albany, where Melville was put to work in a store after going to school in the town, like Cooper before him, for his was a poor relation now and more or less driven to shift for himself with occasional aid from more prosperous uncles and aunts.
The Cooper that Brooks mentions is of course James Fenimore Cooper, a New Yorker who had served in the…
