This year marks the bicentenary of the birth of one of the major figures of American culture. Herman Melville, along with Mark Twain, is responsible not only for authoring a ‘classic’ but also for providing his nation with a mythos, not mythology but work that assumes a particular force and resonance for a national culture. Moby-Dick (1851) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) are two works of fiction (though Melville’s is closer to the epic than a novel) that embody and enact the dramatic break from the American inheritance of European and, especially, English literary traditions: in Mark Twain’s case his creation of the vernacular style or ‘voice’ of American Literature, in Melville’s case the repudiation of formalist constraints of narrative and plot, so much so that E. M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel (1927) characterised Moby-Dick as belonging to a special category of fiction that he called ‘Prophecy’ and included Melville in the select company of Fyodor Dostoevsky and D. H. Lawrence. But the concern here is not with the ‘prophetic’ qualities of Melville’s writings but with the writer as very much a man of his time.

The United States into which Melville was born on 1 August 1819 was a nation a little over three decades into its independence from Great Britain and already encountering disruptions to the newly- established cultural, political and social order of the young republic that were never anticipated by the Founding Fathers. The fourth national census of 1810 counted a population in excess of nine and a half million, and New York, Melville’s birthplace, was now a large city with over 120,00 inhabitants. The population had more or less doubled since the first census of 1790, and ethnic diversity, mainly driven by German, Scotch-Irish, and Swedish immigration, was challenging the Jeffersonian notion of the farm as the statistical centre of American life and values, the American farmer seen as the moral repository of republican virtue and the nation’s protector against the corruptions of industrialisation. Melville’s family was, to an extent, ‘old stock’: though his ancestry was Dutch his father, Allan Melvill (his mother added the ‘e’ to the surname after her husband’s death), was the son of Thomas Melvill who had distinguished himself against the British in the Boston Tea Party and had been duly rewarded by George Washington with the post of Collector of the Port of Boston, a federal appointee responsible for the collection of port taxes and duties. Ironically, this form of employment was to some extent to stay in their family, for it was through Herman Melville’s friendship with Henry Augustus Smythe, collector for the Port of New York, that the novelist was to secure a position as a customs inspector in New York, a position he held for some twenty years until his retirement in 1885, employment that saved him from penury in the depressing years of his literary obscurity.

A new President took office when Melville was ten years old and with him, the United States looked away from Europe and towards the western territories and the Pacific Ocean. Andrew Jackson (7th President of the United States from 1829 to 1837) was of Northern Irish (Ulster Protestant) descent, his parents were among the last of the great waves of migrants from Northern Ireland in the 18th century. His victory over the incumbent, John Quincy Adams, in the general election of 1828 marked the end of New England’s ascendency in the political and social life of the United States. Jackson was both a military hero (he had defeated the British in the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815) and a new breed of politician/statesman. He promoted the idea of the American hero as a ‘working man’ and the westward extension of the American frontier, facilitated in part by Jackson’s policy of Indian Removal, was closely interwoven with making land available for a rapidly growing population and the concomitant rewards of material prosperity since most of the new wealth enjoyed by the United States in its infancy was generated by space. Government, in Jackson’s view, was an expression of the popular will and the common people were not merely the guardians of democracy but also those best placed to exercise the political responsibilities of the republic.

In the eighteenth century, Melville would have been a gentleman farmer leading a life of leisure (as, indeed, he unsuccessfully tried to be from 1850 when he purchased a farm in Pittsfield in western Massachusetts; it was here that the bulk of his major fiction was written). But the ‘Age of Jackson’ demanded work and his father’s bankruptcy in 1832 meant that the years of his adolescence and youth were characterised by genteel poverty, and by 1837, with little money and no prospects, Melville sought gainful employment, first as a clerk in the New York State Bank, later, a mere eighteen years old, as a school-teacher, and then, following the financial panic of 1837 (largely brought on by speculative lending practices in the western states and the serious crop failures of two years earlier), he went to sea in the summer of 1839, the merchant marine being one area of the American economy that maintained a regular supply of work for itinerant labour. Melville secured a berth on St. Lawrence, a ‘packet boat’ (so-called because they serviced the ‘packet trade”) making the New York to Liverpool run and invariably bringing over from the English port those ‘multiplying millions’ from Europe who were drawn to the prospects of a better life in the United States. On his return to New York some four months later he again found work as a school teacher but by January 1841 he was at sea again, this time aboard a three-masted whaling ship, the Acushnet, and he would not return to the United States, now on board a frigate of the American navy, the United States, for another four years.

In Moby-Dick Melville writes of the whaling-ship as ‘my Yale College and my Harvard’ and thereby innocently gave literary expression to a Jacksonian virtue, identifying republican values with work that involved physical labour or the making of things for the new nation. Both Harvard and Yale were elite institutions, modelled after Oxford and Cambridge universities in England, their purpose to train ministers for the church, and it wasn’t until the middle years of Melville’s life that the federal government enacted legislation that established land-grant colleges (later universities) whose mission was ‘to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts’. To identify physical labour of the kind Melville had undertaken, both as a merchant-man and as a crew member of a whaler, with education was to elevate the common man, rude in his habits and his mores, to a position in American society previously held by those of inherited privilege. Thus the very idea of investing Captain Ahab, commander of The Pequod in Moby-Dick, with the status of tragic hero reflects the ambitions of Jacksonian democracy, for Ahab is a self-made, self-reliant man, master of his own destiny (or so he thinks), asserting that no man stands above him. Melville gives conscious expression to this ethos of the common man in chapter 26 of Moby-Dick, ‘Knights and Squires’, where he writes of touching ‘that workman’s arm with some ethereal light’, and Andrew Jackson is numbered among those ‘selectest champions from the kingly commons’ chosen by the ‘Spirit of Equality…the great democratic God!’.

While Melville may not, to the casual reader, have much in common as a writer with his Russian contemporary, Leo Tolstoy, both are thought of as philosophical and in some ways intellectual novelists, and Moby-Dick has affinities with War and Peace in its digressive and seemingly artless construction. Yet they are writers rooted in concrete realities, in the world of facts. Few works of fiction are as factual as Moby-Dick and few novelists have written as well about physical labour, and human toil, as Melville does in chapters such as ‘The First Lowering’ or ‘The Carpenter’. He may, in contrast to Tolstoy, be silent about domestic family life in Moby-Dick but as with Tolstoy’s famous description of Constantin Levin mowing with the peasants in Anna Karenina (1878), Melville’s descriptions of arduous, repetitive activities undertaken in the company of other men are infused with an understanding of the dignity and heroism of manual labour. There is, however, a profound difference between the American and the Russian worlds: the mowing scene in Anna Karenina is a ‘set-piece’, there to allow one of Tolstoy’s central characters to enact the sensuous vitality of a rural life far removed from the intellectual and rationalistic preoccupations of ‘civilised’ men and women such as that of Levin’s half-brother, Koznyshev, and Levin can escape it just as easily as he entered it. But Melville’s characters, notably Ishmael, his narrator, Queequeg, Flask, Stubb, and Tashtego, among others, are the progeny of Andrew Jackson and their duty is to work, to make money for The Pequod’s owners and thus, by extension, to further the progressive development of American society that Jackson’s vision of the United States articulated.

Melville was acutely aware of the challenges confronting American democracy in the middle years of the nineteenth-century: the dramatic and exponential impact of technology and industrialisation, evidenced, most obviously, in the extensive descriptions of the methods and tools of whaling and their effects upon men in Moby-Dick; the breakdown of religious stability and the progressive decline of moral certitudes, especially those that had characterised the Puritan and, more broadly, Protestant inheritance of the United States, again to be found in Moby-Dick but also dramatised in the character of the Reverend Mr. Falsgrave in Pierre (1852); the sectional conflict between the North and South over the issue of slavery that was to lead to the American Civil War of 1861-1865, and which Melville addresses, indirectly, but disturbingly, in the novella, Benito Cereno (1855) and also in ‘Formerly a Slave’, one of the poems from his first volume of verse, Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866); and, arguably encompassing all the above, the rapid growth of a capitalist economy, built, in part, on the supply of labour and technical skills brought by large-scale immigration from Europe, that shifted the balance in the United States from the Jeffersonian ideal of a self-sufficient agrarian society to one dominated by the cash-nexus and the market-place, captured most memorably in the mechanical office duties of the scrivener, Bartleby, in the office on Wall Street in the short story that bears his name. Like any artist aware of his own genius (‘genius is full of trash’ he once wrote of his own work) Melville sought to transcend his age and the resurgence of interest in his work that came in the decades of modernism, the 1910s and the 1920s, is indicative of his success in doing so. Since then his major writings have never been out of print and the criticism and interpretation of his works grows exponentially. But as we look back on his life and career from the vantage point of the bicentenary of his birth we should also recognise the degree to which Melville is a man of his time, a patriotic American celebrating the optimistic vision of Jacksonian democracy, yet also one of those ‘thinking men’ that his contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, called on to challenge the conventional wisdom of the day and to cast a critical eye on the American experiment.

Henry Claridge

Image: Pittsfield, Massachusetts – September 17, 2014: American author Herman Melville’s home, Arrowhead, where he wrote the classic novel “Moby Dick”
Credit: LEE SNIDER PHOTO IMAGES / Shutterstock.com

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I share the generally positive response to the BBC’s adaptation of War and Peace but I also concur with the view of some commentators that the series didn’t seem Russian enough; and this is not a matter of simply pointing out that the faces lack Slavic features or that the physical gestures are insufficiently effusive or melodramatic.  More importantly, the series struggled to convey the intellectual power of Tolstoy’s novel.  Much of this is dramatized through Pierre Bezukhov just as in the later novel, Anna Karenina (1877), Constantine Levin is the vehicle for Tolstoy’s ruminations on seemingly mundane matters such as farming, husbandry, local politics, and bureaucracy, but also on profound questions about morality, social responsibility, revolutionary change, and, above all, religious belief.  Both are simultaneously novels of human drama and of ideas but it is a measure of Tolstoy’s great gifts as a novelist that ideas are rarely presented abstractly, rather they are lodged in the minds of his characters and are articulated in moments of self-awareness and introspection.   War and Peace differs from the later novel in its expository essays, largely on the philosophy of history and the problem of historicism (that is, the view that historical evolution is determined by laws, that these laws are discoverable much as scientific laws are discoverable, and that as a consequence we can predict the future course of events), but also, by extension, addressing the futility of war and the delusions of those who perpetrate it.  The BBC series, understandably, made no attempt to give these ideas any expression, in part, as I anticipated in my earlier ‘blog’, because to do so, for example, in conversation or soliloquy, would seem clumsy and intrusive.  Instead, we were offered some moments of ‘voice-over’, notably in the concluding episode (which ran to eighty minutes) where we hear Pierre’s characteristically ‘Tolstoyan’ reflections on the nature of happiness and the meaning of life.   The result was a dilution of the novel’s intellectual force and this, arguably, made it more difficult for the viewer to grasp the importance of War and Peace as a national epic, so much so that Tolstoy’s ‘thesis’ that Napoleon was defeated not by superior force or more expert military strategy but by what might be called the unconscious will of the Russian people was not (perhaps could not be) made clear.

Thus, while the BBC series didn’t flinch from showing the horror, futility, and chaos of war, the emphasis on family life and, in particular, on the Bolkonskys and the Rostovs, offers some support to those who argue that, all too often, the television serialization of great novels results In lavish costume drama or dynastic family soap operas.  The use of the Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg and locations in Lithuania lent the episodes a visual authenticity that we have come to expect from modern serializations and this was accompanied by meticulous attention to costume, fashion, deportment, regimental uniform, and jewellery.  Viewers enjoy these things and it is easy, and wrong, to impugn them for taking pleasure in the detailed recreation of the historical past, even if we have to point out that the background was never for Tolstoy simply a matter of ‘scenery’.

Television (or, for that matter, the cinema) is, moreover, a medium well-suited to Tolstoy’s literary technique.  He is essentially a dramatic novelist; he shows rather than tells.  We come to know his characters as we do people in life, by the slow but steady accretion of their knowledge of them that is revealed in conversation, gesture, action, behaviour, and the opinion of others, so that our intimacy with them grows as the novel progresses.  Characters are not described by way of long descriptions of their origins, their upbringing, or flashbacks to past events, instead, they are revealed (particularly his women) through the reactions and responses of others, for example, in the early scenes with Natasha and Princess Helene.  This indirect method contributes powerfully to Tolstoy’s realism and, some might argue, makes him a more ‘cinematic’ novelist than English contemporaries such as Dickens and Trollope, both of whom he greatly admired.

One thing for special praise was the series’ attention to the religious dimension of the novel.  Early nineteenth-century Russian society was medieval in character and there was no clear line of demarcation between ordinary life and religious observance, so much so that the rhythms of life and its attendant rituals drew on religious customs and ceremonies; even something as greeting a visitor with bread and salt is invested with profound significance in Russian Orthodoxy.  Both modern historical writing and modern literary criticism are liberal and secular in outlook and frequently ignore, or understate, the role that religious belief plays in the lives of many people.  Tolstoy was dismissive of orthodox Christianity and in many respects thought it absurd, but at the same time, he thought that life without religion was meaningless.  War and Peace communicate this in many ways.  It is, above all, embodied in Pierre and his moral struggle to cease living for himself (as Prince Andrei Bolkonsky does) and instead live for others.  There may have been a temptation to excise Pierre’s meeting with Bazdeev at the inn in Book 5 of Volume 1 (episode 3 of the TV series) but it was intelligently resisted: it is Bazdeev who draws Pierre into the Brotherhood of Freemasons (Tolstoy became absorbed by Freemasonry during his research for the novel) but the importance of these scenes in Book 5 is that their conversation directly addresses Tolstoy’s own thoughts about the limitations of reason, and, by extension, science, and his conviction that a kind of ‘worldly religion’ (that is, one grounded in daily life much as it was to be seen in the peasant class) was a moral necessity.  This religious vision resurfaces towards the end of the novel when Pierre is being held prisoner and he befriends Platon Karataev, the peasant with whom he shares a potato and salt (in Book 14 of Volume 3).  The BBC serialization powerfully evoked the role of religion in Russian culture, whether in scenes of family life such as the christening of Prince Andrei’s son, the death of Count Ilya Rostov, and Princess Marya entrusting her icon to Andrei before he goes to join his regiment in Austria, or in scenes of war such as the procession of priests before battle and their administering last rites to the dead and severely wounded.

There are ‘local’ details at which one might cavil, some trivial, others not.  Much has been made of Tuppence Middleton’s sultriness and seductiveness in the role of Princess Helene Kuragina but Tolstoy describes a more voluptuous woman than the figure Ms Middleton presents, and while Jesse Bentley admirably captured Princess Marya Bolkonskaya’s piety and dutifulness, Tolstoy never describes her as physically unattractive, rather her plainness is something she sees in herself and it is attenuated by her ‘large, deep, and luminous eyes’.   On the other hand, complaints about the ‘raciness’ of the TV series are exaggerated: Tolstoy had none of the Victorian rectitude about physical and sexual love one finds in nineteenth-century English and American writers, as is evidenced above all in the descriptions of physical passion between Anna and Count Vronsky in Anna Karenina.  Too much, however, was made of the supposed incestuous relationship between Helene Kuragina and her brother Anatole: this is merely hinted at, notably when Pierre has doubts about his forthcoming marriage to Helene and recalls the rumour that Anatole was sent away because he was in love with his sister.

We are told the BBC series had an audience of just under six million viewers.  If just half of them pick this very great novel up to read (or, indeed, re-read) then we can thank the corporation for a job well done.

Henry Claridge, Honorary Research Fellow, School of English, University of Kent

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A pupil at a school where I recently gave a talk about Fitzgerald asked me a difficult question: Did I think The Great Gatsby would become ‘out-of-date’?  My initial answer was the obvious one: ‘I  don’t know.’  My next answer was more along the lines of an intelligent guess: ‘Well, Gatsby now is nearly a century old and yet re-reading it the world it evokes remains very modern: people drive cars, read newspapers and magazines, go to the cinema, listen to pop songs, go shopping, use kitchen gadgets, play golf, and more.’  This familiarity helps us ‘feel ourselves’ into the characters of the novel and thus to respond appropriately to the unfolding drama.

Criticism, of course, particularly academic criticism, often seeks to attach importance to works of fiction, most obviously to make them expressions of the ‘national character’, or to see them as offering significant social, historical, or political commentary, and The Great Gatsby, above all of Fitzgerald’s works, has suffered this fate.  But for the reader, however, who goes to fiction for entertainment and diversion the ‘importance’ that may attach to a work is a relatively minor, or ‘second order’ matter.  The pleasure we take in fiction derives from the story (or plot), the characters, the sequence of events (and with it the elements of surprise and suspense, the expected as much as the unexpected), the admixture of the comic and the tragic, the patterns and rhythms of the narrative, the juxtapositions of description, commentary and dialogue, the felicitous phrasing that in a few words evokes a mood or a sensation or a sentiment or a discovery.  When we reflect on what we have read we are struck by what Willa Cather (whom Fitzgerald admired) called ‘remembered pictures’.  The orchestra at the first party at Gatsby’s house that Nick attends plays ‘yellow cocktail music’; the reader joins Gatsby’s guests in speculating about who he might be (he’s ‘a bootlegger’, ‘he killed a man who found out he was a nephew to Von Hindenburg’; ‘he’s an Oggsford man’). As they search for their host,  Nick and Jordan Baker wander around Gatsby’s house and find themselves in ‘a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak’ where a ‘middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles’ exclaims his astonishment at finding that the books are real: ‘Absolutely real – have pages and everything.  I thought they’d be nice durable cardboard’.   Fitzgerald does not forget his unnamed bespectacled intruder, but the comedy of this early scene gives way to pathos when he reappears amongst that small group of people in attendance at Gatsby’s funeral in the last chapter of the novel.

In chapter IV as Gatsby drives Nick Carraway into New York for lunch with Meyer Wolfshiem they cross Blackwell’s Island and a limousine passes them ‘driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl.  I laughed aloud [Nick writes] as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.’  The ‘two bucks’ and the girl are off, no doubt, to one of the Long Island beaches for the afternoon, and what the reader is arrested by here is not merely the skill in the evocation of the brightness (and proximity) of their eyes but the ease with which a whole social world is evoked, for these are the newly prosperous black Americans of which New York had a significant number in the early 1920s and the ‘haughty rivalry’ says ‘Look, we’ve made it too!’   Later the patterning to which I referred above strikes a more sombre note in The Great Gatsby: Myrtle Wilson’s left breast is severed in the accident that kills her outside her husband’s garage and at the very end of the novel Nick reflects on the ‘fresh, green breast of the new world’ that he imagines greeted Dutch sailors’ eyes as they looked at the land that was to become the New Netherland.    We can look elsewhere in Fitzgerald for qualities such as these, for example, the way in which the narrator of The Last Tycoon, Cecilia Brady, reveals the mysteriousness of the central character, Monroe Stahr, a man who works so hard that night and day is a matter of indifference to him, or the poignant simplicity with which Fitzgerald describes Charlie Wales returning to Paris after eighteen months absence in ‘Babylon Revisited’, only to find that everything has changed and that gaiety and extravagance have led to loneliness.  It is hard to dispute the claim that Fitzgerald’s works are ‘important’ but it is not hard to show that the pleasure we take in reading him does not only lie there.

Henry Claridge, School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury

Image: Statue of F. Scott Fitzgerald in Rice Park, St. Paul, Minnesota Credit: Greg Ryan / Alamy Stock Photo

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