The incredible sadness of being - Herman Melville

Had the pleasure within the past week, while (re)reading "Moby-Dick," of visiting both the whaling museum in Nantucket and the Melville home (Arrowhead) in Pittsfield - a Melville pilgrimage, though we didn't plan it that way. The Arrowhead visit, unlike visits to so many writers' shrines, was particularly sad, as our excellent tour guide (Phil Spear) discussed quite accurately the obscurity and failure that hounded and haunted Melville throughout his life and the incredible and deserved international renown that began in the 1920s with the posthumous publication of Billy Budd. Melville was obviously far ahead of his time as a novelist - ahead of our time, even, as those who've tried Pierre or The Confidence Man will attest. The home full of sorrow, obviously a difficult life on this remote, rocky farm, and to think of his reaching out so pathetically to Hawthorne and then being shunned - perhaps because of too intimate advances to the older gentleman - and being alone, his books not selling, all that work - and he knew what he was doing was something great and unique. He could have gone on writing sea adventures, like his first few books, and, as noted in previous posts, that seems to be how Moby-Dick starts out, but then the material grows and the style shifts and becomes grand, oratorical, almost Biblical. Hawthorne may have encouraged this - Melville seems to have said as much - but it's a journey Melville took on his own at great risk and with tremendous cost to himself and his family. The old man, trudging back to New York in poverty, with his troubled children and alienated wife - a chilling scene to envision.