Herman Melville is a towering figure in American
literature--arguably the country's greatest nineteenth-century
writer. Revising a number of entrenched misunderstandings about
Melville in his later years, this is a remarkable and unprecedented
account of the aged author giving himself over to a life of the
mind. Focusing exclusively on a period usually associated with the
waning of Melville's literary powers, William B. Dillingham shows
that he was actually concentrating and intensifying his thoughts on
art and creativity to a greater degree than ever before.
Biographers have written little about Melville's deceptively
"quiet" years after the publication of the long poem "Clarel" in
1876 and before his death in 1891. It was a time when he saw few
friends or acquaintances, answered most of his letters as briefly
as possible, and declined most social invitations. But for
Melville, as for Emily Dickinson, such outward appearances belied
an intense, engaged inner life. If for no other reason, Dillingham
reminds us, this period merits more discerning attention because it
was then that Melville produced "Billy Budd" as well as an
impressive number of new and revised poems--while working full-time
as a customs inspector for more than half of those years.
What sustained Melville during that final period of ill health
and near-poverty, says Dillingham, was his "circle," not of close
friends but of works by a number of writers that he read with
appreciative, yet discriminating, affinity, including Matthew
Arnold, James Thomson, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Honore de Balzac.
Dillingham relates these readings to Melville's own poetry and
prose and to a rich variety of largely underappreciated topics
relevant to Melville's later life, from Buddhism, the School of
Pessimism, and New York intellectual life to Melville's job at the
ever-corrupt customs house, his fear of disgrace and increased
self-absorption, and his engagement with both the picturesque and
the metaphorical power of roses in art and literature.
This portrait of the great writer's final years is at once a
biography, an intellectual history, and a discerning reading of his
mature work. By showing that Melville's isolation was a conscious
intellectual decision rather than a psychological quirk, "Melville
and His Circle" reveals much that is new and challenging about
Melville himself and about our notions of age and the persistence
of imagination and creativity.
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