Melville & His Circle: The Last Years - Hardcover

Dillingham, William B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0820318566 ISBN 13: 9780820318561

Publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr, 1996

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

WILLIAM B. DILLINGHAM is Charles Howard Candler Professor of American Literature at Emory University. His books include An Artist in the Rigging: The Early Work of Herman Melville and Melville's Short Fiction, 1853–1856 (both Georgia).

From Publishers Weekly

With the exception of Billy Budd, which went unpublished in his lifetime, all of Herman Melville's best-known work dates from the early part of his career. However, even as disillusionment with publishers and a general withdrawal from society marked Melville's later years, he never ceased writing. Dillingham's study of the later Melville argues that the author found sufficient companionship in reading the works of like-minded souls as he contemplated both the beauty of art and the sacrifices necessary to create it. According to Dillingham, "Melville's Circle" ranges from Buddhist philosophy to the pessimism of Schopenhauer, from the Human Comedy of Balzac to the poetry of Matthew Arnold. Through study of Melville's personal copies of these works, Dillingham adroitly shows the connections between these authors and Melville's own later verse and prose. Dillingham is far less persuasive, however, in his occasional misguided attempts to posit a direct correlation between what the aging Melville read and what he wrote: Melville's later themes and motifs can mostly already be found in his earlier work, and there's no reason to think he had to look elsewhere to rediscover them. But Dillingham does present a surprisingly intimate portrait of the way a neglected writer nurtured his own inner life through the world of literature.

Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0820318566
• ISBN 13: 9780820318561
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 213