Herman Melville - Later Works

Later Works

During these city years, Melville wrote most of Mardi, completed Redburn and White-Jacket, and began the first chapters of Moby-Dick. He had no problems in finding publishers for Redburn and White-Jacket. Mardi was a disappointment for readers who wanted another rollicking and exotic sea yarn.

At first his progress on Moby-Dick moved swiftly. In early May 1850 he wrote to Richard Henry Dana, also an author, saying he was already "half way" done. In June he described the book to his English publisher as "a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries," and promised it would be done by the fall. Since the manuscript for the book has not survived, it is impossible to know for sure its state at this critical juncture. A common consensus among critics is that at this point, the book was a familiar sea yarn along the lines of his earlier work. Over the next several months, Melville's plan for the book underwent a radical transformation: into what has been described as "the most ambitious book ever conceived by an American writer."

In September of 1850, the Melvilles purchased Arrowhead, a farm house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. (It is now preserved as a house museum in his honor.) Here Melville and Elizabeth lived for 13 years, he occupied with his writing and managing his farm. While living at Arrowhead, Melville befriended the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived in nearby Lenox. Melville was inspired and encouraged by his new relationship with Hawthorne during the period that he was writing Moby-Dick. (He dedicated his new novel to Hawthorne), though their friendship was on the wane only a short time later, when he wrote Pierre.

These later works did not achieve the popular and critical success of his earlier books. The New York Day Book on September 8, 1852, published a venomous attack on Melville and his writings, headlined "HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY." The item, offered as a news story, reported,

"A critical friend, who read Melville's last book, Ambiguities, between two steamboat accidents, told us that it appeared to be composed of the ravings and reveries of a madman. We were somewhat startled at the remark, but still more at learning, a few days after, that Melville was really supposed to be deranged, and that his friends were taking measures to place him under treatment. We hope one of the earliest precautions will be to keep him stringently secluded from pen and ink."

Following this and other scathing reviews of Pierre, publishers became wary of Melville's work. His publisher, Harper & Brothers, rejected his next manuscript, Isle of the Cross, which has been lost. The strain of these reversals weighed heavily on Melville. In late 1856 he made a six month Grand Tour of the British Isles and the Mediterranean. While in England, he spent three days with Hawthorne, who had taken an embassy position there. At the seaside village of Southport, amid the sand dunes where they had stopped to smoke cigars, they had a conversation which Hawthorne later described in his journal:

Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he 'pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated'; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.

Melville's subsequent visit to the Holy Land inspired his epic poem Clarel.

On April 1, 1857, Melville published his last full-length novel, The Confidence-Man. This novel, subtitled His Masquerade, has won general acclaim in modern times as a complex and mysterious exploration of issues of fraud and honesty, identity and masquerade. But, when it was published, it received reviews ranging from the bewildered to the denunciatory.

To repair his faltering finances, Melville was advised by friends to enter what was, for others, the lucrative field of lecturing. From 1857 to 1860, he spoke at lyceums, chiefly on Roman statuary and sightseeing in Rome. Turning to poetry, he gathered a collection of verse, but it failed to interest a publisher.

In 1863, he and his wife resettled in New York City with their four children. After the end of the American Civil War, he published Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) a collection of over 70 poems that was generally ignored by the critics. A few gave him patronizingly favorable reviews. In 1866, Melville's wife and her relatives used their influence to obtain a position for him as customs inspector for the City of New York (a humble but adequately paying appointment). He held the post for 19 years. In a notoriously corrupt institution, Melville soon won the reputation of being the only honest employee of the customs house. But from 1866, his professional writing career can be said to have come to an end.