FICTION: CATHERINE HEANEYreviews The Passages of Herman MelvilleBy Jay Parini Canongate, 454pp. £17.99
THE LIVES of great American writers are familiar terrain to the novelist, critic and poet Jay Parini (his prodigious output includes celebrated biographies of William Faulker and John Steinbeck) so his choice of subject this time around – the passionate and enigmatic author of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville – is hardly a surprising one. That he chose to write a novel is perhaps, at first, less understandable, given the relative scarcity of information about Melville's life and the fact that much of what is known comes from his own autobiographical novels, such as Typeeand Omoo. On the other hand, HM's (as he is called throughout) years as a seaman, his sojourn on the islands of the South Pacific and his later friendship with the other giant of American letters, Nathaniel Hawthorne, provide fertile ground for the novelist's imagination, with ample gaps for Parini to fill with his own inventions (something he did to great effect in The Last Station, his fictional account of Tolstoy's final year).
The opening chapter of The Passages of Herman Melvilleis told in the voice of the author's long-suffering wife, Lizzie, who documents a domestic life turned sour – often violent – by his drinking and volatile temper, and his brooding disappointment at the dwindling of his career. At this point, in 1867, Melville's early success as a writer had deserted him and he published barely anything, working instead as a customs officer on the New York docks, "calling on foreign vessels, checking cargoes, absorbing tales of the sea . . . listening to voices that called from the past".
Taking up his story in the author’s middle age allows Parini to navigate back and forth through HM’s early life, telling vivid tales of his adventures at sea in long, lyrical narrative chapters, interspersed with Lizzie’s memories and accounts of domestic episodes, recounted in her wry, horse-sense voice.
We are told of the young Herman's anguish at the death of his father, which forced him to abandon his education; his formative experiences on board the whaler Acushnet, the salty echoes of which would later find their way into the pages of Moby-Dick; his jumping ship on the Marquesas Islands and spending a gloriously languid and carnal few weeks among its tribe of cannibals; and onwards to Tahiti, Hawaii and eventually back home to marriage and fame. These chapters also trace the evolution of Melville the writer, as he feverishly notes his experiences in his journal, and hones his storytelling skills on the decks of the various ships: "He began to perfect his stories, expanding and contracting them as needed, enhancing their shape, sharpening their detail."
Parini, too, seems to revel in this limbo between fact and fiction that his own book inhabits; at one point, a character quips, “Everyone knows that the truth can’t be told, not in historical writing. You have to make it up, else nobody will believe you.”
All these escapades Parini conjures up in fluid prose, putting his skills as a poet to good use in lush descriptions of tropical landscapes, and revealing much about his characters in passages of easy dialogue (some of it jarringly modern, it must be said). He also exercises his gift for capturing the essential qualities of a person, real or imagined, in a few deft strokes. Most notably, these include portraits of a sequence of beautiful young men who Melville befriends on his travels, becoming tormented by longing and suppressed desire. This is nothing new – the homo-erotic aspect of some of Melville’s writings has been much commented on by academics – but here Parini gives himself free rein (perhaps too much of it) and extrapolates from this ambiguity a life of unfulfilled yearning, culminating in HM’s vision of an angelic youth who sings to him in a cave in the Holy Land. However, there is a blank sameness to these golden young men – in contrast to, say, the monumental and brooding figure of Hawthorne, who is brilliantly evoked. Indeed, the intense friendship with Hawthorne forms one of the novel’s strongest and most successful narrative strands, as Parini explores their intellectual connection and influence on each other’s work (the friendship blossomed while Melville was writing Moby-Dick, which he dedicated to the older author), and recreates the claustrophobic, obsessive nature of Melville’s adoration, which would eventually drive away the more reserved Hawthorne.
There is a poignancy to this separation – from which Melville struggles to recover – and his sadness at this and other tragedies that befall him permeates the remainder of his life. That he was barely remembered as a novelist at the time of his death may seem unthinkable to us now, but it haunts the second half of this engaging novel. As Melville himself wrote, “Deep, deep, and still deep and deeper must we go, if we would find out the heart of a man” – it is an impossible challenge, as Parini well knows, but here he has gone some way to plumbing the depths of this vexing and brilliant man’s heart and soul.
Catherine Heaney is a contributing editor to The Glossmagazine, and co-ordinator of the Faber Academy's courses in Dublin
