Herman Melville: A Half-Known Life — Simply Charly

Herman Melville: A Half-Known Life, Vol. 1 & Vol. 2

By Carl Rollyson

John Bryant, a renowned Herman Melville scholar, writes in the wake of a veritable palimpsest of biographers: Raymond Weaver (1921), Lewis Mumford (1929), Newton Arvin (1950), Leon Howard (1951), Edwin Havilland Miller (1975), Laurie Robertson-Lorant (1996), Hershel Parker (two volumes 1996, 2002), and Elizabeth Hardwick (2000). The usual question, put with the confident ignorance that passes for authority with reviewers, is: What more could there be to say? The question should be: Why not another Melville biography? If there have been so many, then something is missing or misunderstood that biographers continue to pursue. I’ve read Bryant’s predecessors and had more questions to ask than they could answer, which is why one biography is always the answer to another or several other biographies, especially for a writer as protean as Melville.

But half-known means something else as well. The biographer shows us that Melville only half-knew himself, and like all of us, had sides revealed to others that he could not see. That is, after all, the rationale for biography. To those who ask how can a biographer know a subject, let it be said the same question ought to be addressed to the biographical subject, who moves with parts of himself missing…