The Hunt for Herman Melville

The best biographers are scholars on wheels assiduously dogging their subjects' footsteps

By CARL ROLLYSON

Saying that Hershel Parker is as angry as Ahab isn't a flippant or disparaging remark. Like Herman Melville's enraged sea captain, this supremely accomplished scholar believes he is taking on a world that has tried to destroy him.

Mr. Parker is the author of the most thorough and authoritative account of Melville's life ("Herman Melville: A Biography," published in two volumes, in 1996 and 2002). The capstone of five decades of research, textual editing and literary analysis, the work is a masterpiece of the biographer's art. Nearly every page abounds with discoveries that plug the holes and correct the errata of other biographers, even as Mr. Parker adds to their best insights.

Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative

By Hershel Parker
Northwestern, 587 pages, $45

Biography is accretion, where one detail builds gradually upon another creating over time a complex portrait. Mr. Parker has spent a lifetime in archives—in New York City, London and virtually everywhere else Melville traveled, resided or worked—uncovering all sorts of fresh material. He has tried, for instance, to find every book, magazine or newspaper Melville ever read. Even Mr. Parker marvels at the single-mindedness with which he has pursued his subject—"more than half a century for a biography of only one writer!" he exclaims in his fascinating new account of his career and his craft.

Mr. Parker is one of the class of scholar-adventurers that originated in the 18th century, with James Boswell scooping up every scrap of Dr. Johnson's words and exploring every relationship that made the slightest difference in the Great Cham's life. James Anthony Froude was the only 19th-century biographer to rival Boswell's achievement. His thorough and candid life of Thomas Carlyle (1882-84) brought upon him the carping of literary critics, who believed he had revealed too much about his choleric subject's life and even accused him of fabricating intimate details. Boswell had also been so chastised by the literary establishment.

Biography didn't really recover from the opprobrium directed at Boswell and Froude until the mid-20th century, when a sequence of great works put it on new footing: Leon Edel on Henry James (1953-72), Richard Ellmann on James Joyce (1959), Richard Sewall on Emily Dickinson (1974) and Joseph Frank on Dostoevsky (1976-2002). Then came Richard Holmes, with his biographies of Shelley (1974) and Coleridge (1989, 1998), and Norman Sherry, with his multi-volume Graham Greene (1989- 2004), who made of the biographer a heroic figure, an intellectual daredevil assiduously tracking his subject's "footsteps"—to cite the title of Mr. Holmes's classic account of his arduous travels as a "romantic biographer."

The best biographers aren't your stay-at-home types; they are scholars on wheels—on foot, on skis—doing whatever it takes to get the story. In the episodic chapters of "Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative" (a play off the subtitle of "Billy Budd"), Mr. Parker sets out to explain and justify his work as researcher and biographer. He writes about theories of biography, the importance of textual fidelity and the travails of archival work. Anyone who wants to learn how to write a multi-volume life of a writer could start here.

But Mr. Parker also believes that critics representing two mighty forces (academia and the New York intellectual world) are bent on destroying the kind of scholarship that he has practiced his whole career. "Despite its immense popularity, literary biography is under attack from subversive interlopers," he writes, and ticks off a literary enemies list of academic critics, mainstream book reviewers and "interpretive" biographers who scorn careful research while favoring their own pet theories and interpretations. In "Melville Biography," he wants to turn the tables on "agenda-driven reviewers" and "recidivist critics" who have written negatively about his own books or who, he believes, have recklessly distorted Melville's life and work. Unusually, he names names—critics like Edmund Wilson, James Wood and Andrew Delbanco and many other prominent intellectuals come in for rough treatment.

Mr. Parker's first brush with this literary-critical tribunal came in 1968, when Wilson published an attack in the New York Review of Books on the scholarship that he and other young researchers had done for the Modern Language Association's editions of canonical American writers. Their textual and historical grunt work was designed to shed light on such basic and important scholarly building blocks as printer's errors in different version of Hawthorne, Melville and Howells. Wilson savaged the MLA's editions, saying that such pedantic compilations of lists of data were of minimal significance. "The old Tyrant of Talcottville," as Mr. Parker calls him, dismissed these diligent scholars for being more concerned with documents than literature. And "Wilson's prestige," Mr. Parker recalls, "was such that flatterers leapt to endorse his views," without ever reading the works. Mr. Parker found that, in his own department at the University of Southern California, his work had lost all "social legitimacy." "Even thirty and forty years later," he claims, "younger critics justified themselves to their coteries by huddling behind the corpse of Wilson as they lobbed fuzees underhanded toward scholarly editions and biographies."

In those days, literature departments were still dominated by the "New Criticism," a philosophy of literary interpretation that dismisses the artistic process. The finished work is all that matters. ("The design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art," wrote the New Critics W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley in 1954.) The emphasis on "theory" that supplanted New Criticism, including such approaches as Deconstruction and the New Historicism—to name just two fashionable academic innovations—were even more inimical to biography. Acolytes operated from the assumption that biographical data was unstable, because the very notion of an "author" in command of language is dubious.

Such intellectual fads, Mr. Parker argues, deprive literature of the very life out of which it springs. Academic critics behave as though published texts are some unified whole, when in fact many literary classics exist in flawed versions—indeed, if one looks far back enough they exist only in corrupt editions that keep us from knowing fully what the author intended. Meticulous work with original documents can result in radical changes in our understanding of an author.

Mr. Parker describes how his sense of the relationship between Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne was altered when he looked more closely at Hawthorne's account of one of their meetings. Mr. Parker realized that Hawthorne had not looked "mildly"—as several commentators supposed—but "wildly." This one word matters because it reveals a more emotional Hawthorne than other accounts would have us believe. Melville sought not merely Hawthorne's support as a fellow author, but the older writer's affection. Hawthorne never seemed quite prepared to reciprocate Melville's desire for intimacy, but a Hawthorne who looks at Melville wildly suggests the former felt something after all. On "one wobbly letter," Mr. Parker demonstrates, a world of meaning hangs. Only the research biographer, learning how to read his subject's handwriting and studying his letters and everything that is legible in a life, can hope to understand the play of a writer's mind.

Mr. Parker (born 1935) began as a disciple of Jay Leyda, an indefatigable amateur scholar who developed a consuming obsession with the life and work of Herman Melville. Combing through archives of letters, newspaper stories and even the proverbial laundry lists, Leyda (with the aid of fellow Melvilleans like the young Hershel Parker) compiled countless facts and documents that were then logged into an all-encompassing "Melville Log" (published in two volumes in 1951, and again with a supplement in 1969). Leyda & Co. established a chronology of Melville's day-to-day life, and their tireless efforts uncovered numerous primary sources that shaped modern Melville studies. Anyone who writes about Melville today relies upon the vast stores of material that they accumulated—though it is Mr. Parker who drew most extensively upon them for his monumental biography.

Yet throughout his career, Mr. Parker complains, popular reviewers and academic critics have derided him as a collector of trivialities. He cites James Wood complaining, in the New Republic in 1997, that too many pages in the first volume of his biography were spent recapitulating the reviews of "Omoo," Melville's second novel and his second semi-autobiographical account of life in the Pacific. Mr. Parker contends, though, that what can seem like minutiae is crucial to explaining what was happening in the life of the 28-year-old writer. Unfavorable notices of "Omoo"—a best seller in the end—would have meant that he and his fiancée, Elizabeth Shaw, could not have announced their engagement. Nor could Melville have "confidently embarked on 'Mardi' "—yet another South Pacific narrative but one linked less to Melville's own adventures than to his emerging worldview and philosophical musings. This was where his art began to turn toward the type of writing that produced "Moby-Dick," and thus a decisive moment in Melville's life hinged on whether he could become a family man and support his family as an author. The reviews, in short, mattered deeply to Melville, as they must to the scholar, if not the critic. The Melville of theorists and literary critics, Mr. Parker suggests, is an "amputated manikin," "a condensed version"—primarily a high-minded writer of literary prose, and not the workaday writer whom Mr. Parker presents.

Mr. Wood accused Mr. Parker of being a slave to "Lilliputian facts." It is a common critique. In truth, though, Mr. Parker's Melville biography goes adrift in the opposite direction, inclining toward occasional overstatement and over-certainty about Melville's life. Mr. Parker writes with such assurance that he sometimes omits the qualifying "perhaps" or "maybe." He assumes that readers know how biographer's words arise out of a supply of facts, evidence and inferences that sometimes amount to imaginative leaps. And he uses that dreaded phrase "must have been" with so little compunction that he seems to want someone to take up his dare.

Mr. Parker's greatest enmity is reserved for Andrew Delbanco, professor of American studies at Columbia University, who the biographer believes has deliberately tried to discredit him. Mr. Delbanco dismissed the first volume of "Herman Melville" in the New York Review of Books in 1997. He not only disparaged the new data that Mr. Parker contributed to Melville biography but also suggested that Mr. Parker invented details to suit his all-consuming quest to tell his subject's story—a nearly mortal blow to a biographer who has spent his entire career documenting every aspect of his subject's life.

Mr. Parker quotes Mr. Delbanco questioning the former's characterization of Melville as "the first American author to become a sex symbol" and dismissing the evidence as merely a phrase taken from "one woman's fan letter." In fact, Mr. Parker says, he was relying on what he calls "many diverse pieces of evidence," including the responses of numerous men in contemporary reviews and newspaper notices who found "Typee" titillating because it described the sailor-narrator's romps with native women on a South Seas island. Mr. Parker cites one newspaper that greeted Mr. Melville's engagement announcement with the quip that the "fair forsaken Fayaway [the novel's South Seas heroine]" should sue for "breach of promise." Mr. Parker emphasizes that he was describing reactions to Melville's writing, not the behavior of the man: Mr. Delbanco's claim that the biographer portrays a strutting, "randy young man" attributes a vulgar idea to Mr. Parker that is nowhere in his text.

The point of this particular disagreement becomes clear when Mr. Parker notes that, in "Melville: His World and Work" (2005), Mr. Delbanco described Melville as "the randy young globe-trotter up in the attic reliving his escapades." Imagine Mr. Parker's chagrin when he saw Mr. Delbanco's words referring to the novelist as bait for the "nineteenth-century equivalent of a rock star's groupies"! He has a right to wonder: "Is there a technical term in rhetoric, poetics, or jurisprudence for what Delbanco has achieved here in the reuse of material, mine and his?"

Such subtle pilfering, indeed, is all too characteristic of the high-toned critics writing for the major book-reviewing publications. They are paid to review a biography and instead raid the text in order to show off their knowledge (gained from the very book under review), adding some interpretive flourish and later republishing the agglomeration in their own books. A new biography is always welcome, but too often the popular press pays attention only to the new, and Mr. Parker clearly feels that authors who write "interpretive biographies" and lean on his scholarship are in some way passing his work off as their own.

Mr. Parker has a word for the mentality of such men: archivophobic. "We have entered a period when very few academics do archival research," he writes. They hardly ever venture in the stacks and almost never explore the wider world. He thinks Mr. Delbanco gets the details wrong in his 2005 book, when discussing such matters as the novelist's time in upstate New York. Mr. Parker corrects Mr. Delbanco: "Why he thought Melville would have written in the attic of the Lansingburgh house is beyond me," he comments, "and I have been up there to check out that low dark space."

The contemporary aversion to research is bitterly ironic because it is easier to do than ever before. The digitization of old documents and proliferation of scholarly databases has revolutionized the way scholars can pursue a paper trail, providing virtually instant access to materials from across the world.

Mr. Parker himself revels in the new online world, in the new Melville facts to be gleaned from newly available newspaper archives, for instance. He takes great enjoyment in drawing a contrast between the ephemera produced by prominent dilettantes and the lasting contributions of diligent but barely known literary bloggers—"divine amateurs"—who have made important discoveries of Melville sources. One blogger, Nicole Perrin, even discovered, through her "marathon reading of Melville," a source for a passage in the author's book-length poem "Clarel"—a source that Melville scholars had never considered.

Digging in the archives, Mr. Parker believes, is the only method for turning up new discoveries about important figures like Melville. The pleasures of the text will always make an exclusive appeal to academic and literary critics who prefer their literature pure. But, as another distinguished biographer, Michael Holroyd, has written, the function of biographies is to make us less "bookish." I once listened to an academic biographer of Marianne Moore give a talk and be asked about the people he had interviewed. "Interviews," the man said in a dismissive voice. "They're so messy." Exactly so, and literature cannot be conceived aside from that mess. It is what life, and art, are made of.

"Melville Biography" is a superb contribution to a fledgling field: the study of the writing of literary lives. To a young academic with even the faintest interest in biography, Mr. Parker's book may come as a revelation, as well as a horrifying insight into the way biographers and biography have been abused. It should also be a call to arms, although I doubt that in the tenure-bound, cliquish world of the academy many will follow Hershel Parker into the breach.

—Mr. Rollyson is the author of "A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography." His most recent biography is "American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath."

A version of this article appeared March 30, 2013, on page C5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Hunt for Herman Melville.