There are few more poignant tragedies than the life of Herman Melville. Now recognised as one of a handful of universally great writers, in the class of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, in his lifetime he was neglected and his literary output despised.
Only in the 1920s did the great Melville revival begin and it has barely stopped since. So discouraged was Melville by the reception of his books that he virtually stopped writing prose and turned to poetry after 1857; The Confidence Man, which could have been a masterpiece, was left incomplete, to rank alongside The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Weir of Hermiston as one of literature's great "unfinished symphonies", and the same fate befell Melville's late novella Billy Budd (interrupted by death) which showed the novelist returning to his best form.
The poetry turned out to be an artistic cul-de-sac, with the great narrative poem Clarel - about the multiple meanings of the Holy Land - more white elephant than white whale. And yet Melville seriously thought he could find fame and fortune as a writer. This second volume of Hershel Parker's monumental life opens with a euphoric Melville having a "launch party" for two with Nathaniel Hawthorne, quite convinced that his sublime allegory Moby Dick was about to take the literary world by storm. Dramatic irony indeed.
Melville's last 40 years were sad and miserable by any standards. Although he did not quite attain Mozart's pauper's grave, he was forced to work from the age of 47 until 66 as a customs inspector in New York. While his father-in-law, Judge Lemuel Shaw, was alive, he was prepared to subsidise Herman's eccentric literary productions, but the judge's daughter, Elizabeth, Melville's wife, pulled the plug thereafter. Even though she became an extremely wealthy woman from a variety of bequests, she insisted that her husband continue in his lowly job, doling out a "book allowance" of $25 a month as a sop. The extent of her harshness can be appreciated when it is realised that Melville had to work six days a week at $4 a day for nearly 20 years, all the time itching to be back in his study.
Elizabeth, a stupid,wilful and manipulative woman, understood nothing of literature and accepted the received opinion that her husband was at best an eccentric with no talent; if he was talented, she reasoned,why did his books not sell? His incapacity with money - he thought nothing of getting into debt to acquire a rare edition or a beloved painting - led her to conclude that he was "insane" and she contemplated leaving him. Deterred by the proprieties and conventional opinion, she refused to cooperate with a harebrained scheme by her brothers (who hated Herman because Judge Shaw had loved him) to "kidnap" her and took her revenge in other ways.
She intrigued to make sure Herman kept his job as a customs inspector, to the point where, at the age of 58, he had to accept longer hours to avoid being sacked. And Melville had other sadnesses to endure. His two sons predeceased him (one by suicide), as did all three of his brothers and three sisters. The overall picture that emerges of the late Melville is of a deeply depressed recluse.
Hershel Parker is a US academic biographer of the quasi-Teutonic "put everything in" school. Since most of Melville's achievements both in life and work were behind him by the time this volume opens,the author faces a steep uphill task in sustaining interest during 40 years in which not very much happened. There was a trip to Europe, the Mediterranean and the Holy Land in 1857-58, a voyage to California via Cape Horn in 1860, a brief look at the front line in the American Civil War in 1864 (he was too old to fight).
It cannot be denied that this volume has its extended longueurs. American academics rarely prize economy and lucidity and, if they have spent years in the archives, the reader is, as they say, about to find this out. The best thing is to lie back and enjoy it and, in fairness, there is much for the dedicated Melvillean to enjoy.
Parker is much better as a scholar and textual analyst than as a literary critic and shortchanges us badly on Billy Budd. But in his own eccentric way, despite the prolixity, the overabundance of detail and the interminable summaries of long forgotten literary reviews, he does excavate the occasional nugget, pointing,for example, to Melville's verbal tics and fondness for words like "glide". There is even the odd anachronistic PC nudge to the reader, as when Melville is taken to task for objecting to the noise of sewing machines while he was working - he was, Parker tells us, insensitive to the world of female labour. But the author's labours do enable us to appreciate what a shrewd judge of literature and human nature Melville was; he always detested the homicidal poseur General Custer, for instance. Overall,though, the message is of the oppression of innocence and integrity by experience and cynicism.
It is not just in our own times that writers of great talent give up in despair, lose confidence or commit suicide because of our pursuit of the lowest possible common denominator. Both America's greatest writers of the 19th century,Melville and Whitman, suffered poverty and obscurity simply because ordinary readers demanded that the great artist go one hundred per cent of the way to meet them.
Frank McLynn's latest book is Wagon's West - the epic story of America's overland trails, published by Jonathan Cape
Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 2, 1851-1891. By Hershel Parker, Johns Hopkins UP, 997pp. £31 sterling