Melville the Great

HERMAN MELVILLE--Lewis Mumford--Harcourt, Brace ($3.50).

The Man. A white hedonist basking deliciously among South Sea Islanders and a sturdy Cape Codder poising his malicious harpoon over boiling seas, join incongruously in the popular impression of Herman Melville. As a matter of fact, he was born of eminently conforming New Englanders and but for a few glorious seagoing years, lived drably enough as an indifferent farmer, writing feverishly in the slack winter season. Failing as farmer, failing too as popular writer, he aspired to a post at some foreign consulate, but had to content himself with a job as customs inspector. He once described the post as "a most inglorious one; indeed, worse than driving geese to water," but at least it kept him near to the life of the sea and took care of his Manhattan houseful of wife and nondescript children.

Yet this is the man who, according to the present discerning biographer, "shares with Walt Whitman the distinction of being the greatest imaginative writer that America has produced; his epic, Moby Dick, is one of the supreme poetic monuments of the English language; and in depth of experience and religious insight there is scarcely any one in the nineteenth century, with the exception of Dostoyevsky, who can be placed beside him."

Epic. The sentimental cinema version of Moby Dick served as a reminder of the curious, thrilling story of Ahab, monomaniac. "A Khan of the plank and a king of the sea and a great Lord of Leviathans was Ahab." His was a terrific pride, and a consuming lust for vengeance on the White Whale. Moby Dick, who in malice, or in play, or accident, or instinctive self-defense had bitten off Ahab's leg and left him humiliated, crippled, to hobble on a stump of whale ivory. "Ever since that almost fatal encounter Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him not only all his bodily woes but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations."

A chase to the catastrophic finish, Moby Dick provides palpitating cinema material, to say nothing of a complete scientific compendium of whaledom. But far more than these it offers so excellent a parable on the mystery of evil that every man can read into it the drama of his own experience. "Mr. D. H. Lawrence sees in the conflict a battle between the blood-consciousness of the white race and its own abstract intellect, which attempts to hunt and slay it: Mr. Percy Boynton sees in the whale all property and vested privilege, laming the spirit of man: Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has found in the white whale an image like that of Grendel in Beowulf, expressing the Northern consciousness of the hard fight against the elements; while for the disciple of Jung, the white whale is the symbol of the Unconscious which torments man, and yet is the source of all his proudest efforts." Less tortuous is Mr. Mumford's own interpretation: "The white whale stands for the brute energies of existence, blind, fatal, and overpowering, while Ahab is the spirit of man small and feeble, but purposive, that pits its puniness against this might, and its purpose against the blank senselessness of power."

Anticlimax. Preliminary to Moby Dick Melville had written Types, unsurpassed romance of the South Sea Islands. Writing of uninhibited natives he included several anecdotes that seemed to a pious public indelicate ; writing of meddling missionaries he seemed to that public irreverent. Bewildered Melville allowed his publishers to expurgate and his present biographer believes the bowdlerization warped his entire career. His second book, Omoo, another virile tale of the South Seas, was written with something of caution; so also White Jacket, semi-symbolic travelogue. And into Mardi, strange allegorical concoction, crept a defiance of public tastes which, submerged in Moby Dick, reap peared malignant in Pierre. Heart's blood had gone into the creation of Moby Dick; it was received coldly, casually. In a frenzy of frustration, Melville retaliated with the morbid chaos of venalities Pierre, subtitled The Ambiguities. Redeemed as it is by occasional passages of sad beauty, it is an excellent commentary on its author. For a decade after writing Pierre Melville relapsed into a state that has been inaccurately called insanity. Melville himself called it "Timonism" after Shakespeare's harassed Athenian and his biographer concurs with utmost sympathy.

Then came the Civil War, challenging Melville to a passion of partisanship. And once the darkness of war had passed, Melville's own troubles seemed also to fade: he mellowed to serene old age, wrote prolifically pallid short stories and The Confidence Man, pseudo-narrative treatise.

Significance. Earlier biographies of Herman Melville are Raymond Weaver's exhaustive pioneer work and Henry Stedman's careful study. Percy Boynton, John Erskine, Henry Seidel Canby have offered Melville generous tribute, comparing him with Conrad, with Swift, Rabelais and Shakespeare; but Mumford surpasses them all in his enthusiasm. If his superlatives rouse occasional suspicion they stimulate a constant interest. Excited by his subject he imparts the rare spirit of Melville conflicting with all existence particularly in the age in which he lived. History of a man, the Mumford biography is shrewd commentary on a century.

Author. Lewis Mumford, 33, has attended public schools, universities of Manhattan. Sometime associate editor of the Dial, acting editor of Sociological Review of London, contributor to the New Republic, American Mercury and Journal of the American Institute of Architects, is now one of the editors of the American Caravan. Author of Sticks and Stones and The Golden Day, he was chosen by Charles Beard to write on "The Arts" for that compendium of modern civilization entitled Whither Mankind (TIME, Nov. 5).

Author Mumford wants his arts "useful." To Prof. Patrick Geddes, lately of Bombay and now of Edinburgh, he acknowledges an "intellectual debt" in the study of "synthetics"--the art of making science, especially biology and geography, serve society in town-planning, education and the like.