Sunday, April 14, 2013

"BECAUSE NEWTON ARVIN HAD A BAD TRIP IN 1929" . . . . Newton Arvin took a Bad Trip then Hauled Herman Melville on Bad Trips and then Blinded John Updike to Melville's Aesthetic Experiences and Reflections



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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