Hasty notes on the power of Newton Arvin’s domination of the
literary clique of that truly insular place, New York City. How Newton
Arvin’s own bad trip in 1929 led him to project bad trips upon Melville in 1849
and 1856-1857, and how Arvin’s bad trip blinded John Updike to the remarkable
aesthetic value of Melville’s trips.
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. “[p]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!
How many biographers have read episodes and personages in
the light of events in their own lives and in the light of people whom they
knew?
Arvin’s focus for two of the three pages he gave to
Melville’s 1856-1857 trip was on “Palestine, in particular.” He mentioned
Melville’s sailing among the Greek islands, said he had been fascinated in
Constantinople by the site, the mosques, and the squalor, acknowledged his
interest in the throngs at Syra, records his seeing the Parthenon, Posilipo,
and Venice, but the focus was on Palestine: “What beguiled him now,” Arvin
summed up, “was not freshness, greenness, and gaiety, but emblems of ruin and
decay.” Of art and sculpture is this: “The pictures and sculptures in the
galleries, in Naples, in Rome, in Florence, allured him almost endlessly,” even
though the “ground-tone of his mood” was weariness and a hope for the cessation
of pain.
Christopher Sten in his 1991 “Melville and the Visual Arts:
An Overview” offers a corrective contrast to Arvin, although he also apparently
thought Melville should have offered extensive commentary in his journal:
“Melville saw more paintings than anything else on this European sojourn, but
it is worth noting that many of them inspired only a phrase or two, at most, in
his journal.” Sten continues: “most of the works he viewed in Paris and
Cologne, on the second and third legs of his journey, merited hardly a mention;
in many cases, not even the names of the artists have been recorded. . . . By
contrast, in London, on the initial leg of his trip, Melville typically
recorded at least some basic details, and sometimes something of his own
impressions, of the paintings he saw there.” Wanting to give a fair account of
Melville’s “engagement with the arts,” Sten itemizes some of the “range of
paintings Melville commented on” in his journal.
Sten’s minimizing had a different basis than Arvin’s. Sten
was minimizing all previous experiences in order to magnify one: “The fates,
however, saved the best for last”—Melville’s view of the “Superb paintings” at
the home of Samuel Rogers, paintings by many of the Italian and Dutch “old
masters” as well as several works by J. M. W. Turner. Drawing on Robert
Wallace, Sten concludes: “No other pictorial artist, it now seems certain, can
be said to have had so profound an effect on Melville’s Moby-Dick as Turner; the impact of this visual artist ranks with
the impact of literary artists Like Shakespeare, Hawthorne, or the authors of
the Bible in the shaping of Melville’s book.” One could disagree with Sten on
the impact of Turner specifically on Moby-Dick
and could substitute another name for “Hawthorne” (Milton, for instance). But
neither Sten nor any other critic of Melville now would agree with Arvin that
“The trip had no very profound effect on Melville’s development: it was too
late in the day for that.”
Melville’s own lecture on statues in Rome (1857-1858) is a
good guide to a limited part of his aesthetic researches on his 1856-1857 trip
and his subsequent reflections, but Horsford’s edition of Melville’s Journals is still the best guide to
Melville’s tour of natural wonders, architectural wonders, and paintings and
sculptures in Great Britain, the Mediterranean, and (toward the end of his
tour) Holland. Horsford records Melville’s determined visiting of art galleries
and studios of painters and sculptors, particularly in Italy, and in his notes
identifies artists and works of art Melville learned about. For the rest of
Melville’s life he reflected on aesthetic issues he formulated on this long
Grand Tour or in subsequent reflections. Because of his exposure to
architecture and art on this trip he undertook, in the years after his return,
what was no less than a course in art history and aesthetics.
In the first paragraph of his 10 May 1852 NEW YORKER essay
on “Melville’s Withdrawal” John Updike acknowledged his debt to Newton Arvin’s
blaming Melville’s loss of his literary career on some malign force in “the
American mind.” Ignoring recent documentary work on Melville, Updike mentioned
“a four-month excursion to England whose ostensible purpose was to settle the
details of the British publication of his fifth book, “’White-Jacket.’” Updike
treated the 1856-57 trip (“a restorative voyage to the Holy Land”) as if all
Melville really did on it was visit Hawthorne in Liverpool. I’m flipping back
and forth through my marked-up copy of the New Yorker article and I can’t see
any place where Updike ever shows Melville as looking at a painting or a piece of sculpture or
gawked at an architectural marvel or monstrosity.
Guided by Newton Arvin (195), John Updike throughout his 1982
smug, arrogant dismissal of Melville as victim of a hostile America paid no
attention at all to Melville as a lover of art and as a man who despite his
lack of early training became fascinated by problems in aesthetics. Because
Newton Arvin had a bad trip to London and Paris in 1929 Updike denied Melville all
aesthetic experiences abroad in 1848 and in 1856-1857.
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