When Winter Comes to Main Street

by Grant M. Overton

“Generally, however, especially for the most important periods and the most thrilling events in Melville’s life, Mr. Weaver has been compelled to depend upon the books the man wrote.

“The book, on the whole, is worthy of its subject. It is written with warmth, subtlety, and considerable humour. Smiles and thoughts lie hidden within many of its pregnant lines. One of the biographer’s very strangest suggestions is never made concrete at all, so far as I can discern. The figure of the literary discoverer of the South Seas emerges perhaps a bit vaguely, his head in the clouds, but there is no reason to believe that Melville’s head was anywhere else when he was alive. Hawthorne is at last described pretty accurately and not too flatteringly. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850; Moby Dick in 1851. It is one of the eternal ironies that the one should be world-famous while the other is still struggling for even national recognition. There are long passages, well-studied and well-written, dealing with the whaling industry and the early missionaries, which will be extremely helpful to any one who wants a bibliographical background for the ocean and South Sea books. Melville’s London notebook is published for the first time and there is a nearly complete reprint of his first known published paper ‘Fragments From a Writing Desk,’ which appeared in two numbers of The Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser in 1839 (not 1849, as the bibliography erroneously gives it). Mr. Weaver is probably right in ascribing Melville’s retirement from literature to poverty (it was a fortunate year that brought him as much as $100 in royalties and his account at Harper’s was usually overdrawn), to complete disillusionment, which made it impossible for him to say more than he had already said, even on the subject of disillusionment, and to ill-health.

“It is a pleasure, moreover, to find that Mr. Weaver has a warm appreciation of Mardi and Pierre, books which have either been neglected or fiercely condemned since they first appeared, books which are no longer available save in early editions. They are not equal to Moby Dick, but they are infinitely more important and more interesting than Typee and Omoo, on which the chief fame of the man rests. It is to his credit that Mr. Weaver has perceived this, but a great deal more remains to be said on the subject. Mardi, Moby Dick, and Pierre, as a matter of fact, form a kind of tragic trinity: Mardi is a tragedy of the intellect; Moby Dick a tragedy of the spirit, and Pierre a tragedy of the flesh. Mardi is a tragedy of heaven, Moby Dick a tragedy of hell, and Pierre a tragedy of the world we live in.

“Considering the difficulties in his path, it may be said that Mr. Weaver has solved his problem successfully. The faults of the book, to a large extent, as I have already pointed out, are not the faults of the author, but the faults of conditions circumscribing his work. At any rate, it can no longer be said that no biography exists of the most brilliant figure in the history of our letters, the author of a book which far surpasses every other work created by an American from The Scarlet Letter to The Golden Bowl. For Moby Dick stands with the great classics of all times, with the tragedies of the Greeks, with Don Quixote, with Dante’s Inferno and with Shakespeare’s Hamlet.”

v

A man who is certainly an authority on naval subjects tells me that The Grand Fleet by Viscount Jellicoe of Scapa is the masterpiece of the great war. He does not mean, of course, in a literary sense; but he does most emphatically mean in every other sense. I quote from the review by P. L. J., of Admiral Jellicoe’s second book, The Crisis of the Naval War. The review appeared in that valuable Annapolis publication, the Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute for April, 1921:

“This interesting book is the complement of his first volume, The Grand Fleet,1914-16. Admiral Jellicoe, the one man who was best situated to know, now draws aside the curtains and reveals to us the efforts made by the Admiralty to overcome the threat made by the German submarine campaign. The account not only deals with the origin ashore of the defence and offence against submarines, but follows to sea the measures adopted where their application and results are shown.

“The first chapter deals at length with the changes made in the admiralty that the organisation might be logical and smooth working to avoid conflict of authority, to have no necessary service neglected, to provide the necessary corps of investigators of new devices, and above all to free the first Sea Lord and his assistants of a mass of detail that their efforts might be concentrated on the larger questions.

“The appendices are of value and interesting because they show the organisation at different periods and emphasise the fact that the Naval Staff at the end of the war was the result of trial and error, natural growth, and at least one radical change adopted during the war.