Newton Arvin Takes Herman Melville on a Bad Trip

When I bought and read Newton Arvin’s “critical biography” Herman Melville early in 1962 I was not impressed with the biographical part of the book. “132--London not important,” says one of my skeptical notes on a flyleaf. Arvin had been dogmatic about Melville’s 1849 weeks in England and the excursion to the Continent: “The trip had no very profound effect on Melville’s development: it was too late in the day for that.” All but ignoring Melville’s attention to painting and sculpture, Arvin stressed Melville’s homesickness and his chauvinism: “The ruins on the Drachenfels seemed to him glorious—‘but,’ he added to himself defiantly, ‘the river Rhine is not the Hudson.’” According to Arvin, Melville was not affected by the paintings and sculptures he saw in London and Paris. He named not one painting and not one piece of sculpture that Melville saw.

Arvin’s ignoring Melville’s exposure to collections of European art was a mystery to me. I might have gone to my grave mystified had I not in 2009 bought Barry Werth’s The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal (2001). Arvin himself had made a trip to London and Paris in 1929. In London he had found himself, as he wrote a friend, “a bad traveler,” tempted to “take a boat home” right away. Then after “suffocating in the heat” during “twenty-five days in Paris,” he fled home. Because he himself had been miserable in London and Paris in 1929, Arvin was sure that Melville could not have been exhilarated by his experiences in 1849 and sure that he wanted only to return home, as soon as he reasonably could. The 1929 trip had had no very profound effect on Arvin’s development: it was too late in the day for that. Therefore the 1849 “trip had no very profound effect on Melville’s development: it was too late in the day for that.” Mystery solved!