Beyond Melville the literary legend

A few days after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, I heard a report that a station had been set up at the Lexington Avenue Armory at 26th Street to provide information on the dead and missing. A mild embarrassment came over me, because at a time of national tragedy I was having a literary association: There's a plaque on the armory commemorating the fact that Herman Melville lived there. In a house on that site, Melville wrote "Clarel," "Timoleon" and "Billy Budd," and there he died, virtually forgotten, in September of 1891.

Associations grew in the months ahead. There is the newspaper headline that Ishmael imagines reading in the first chapter of "Moby-Dick": "Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States / Whaling Voyage by One Ishmael / Bloody Battle in Afghanistan." The coincidences (including the biblical Ishmael's role as father of the Arab people) were disturbing. Others noticed this convergence and wrote about it. Likewise, in "Melville: His World and Work," Andrew Delbanco, who teaches American literature at Columbia University, observes that Capt. Ahab's monomaniac pursuit of the white whale has everywhere been appropriated as a symbol for political fanaticism.

Delbanco's engaging, comprehensive and well-written biography focuses primarily on Melville's work, asserting its undeniable presence in our literary consciousness as well as our popular culture. He provides much necessary and useful background about Melville's family and working life, about which relatively little is known. He avoids overindulging in speculation about Melville's marriage and sexuality, although the questions are there for those who wish to consider them in light of Melville's work -- particularly the fascinating oscillations of his novel "Pierre, or the Ambiguities." Delbanco's study is also richly textured with insights from some of the best Melville critics of the last half century.

His own contribution to understanding Melville's enormously diverse and complex work is less biographical than historical and political. He sees "Moby-Dick" largely as an allegory of antebellum America, with the fiery, skeletal, pro-slavery Sen. John C. Calhoun as Capt. Ahab. While he argues plausibly that certain references would have satirized the political moment and been recognized by readers at the time, those readings seem almost as trivial as equating Ahab with George W. Bush (or Donald H. Rumsfeld, or name your politician).