I stumbled across this review today in COMPARATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES 2.1 (March 2004)--just a decade late. Thank you, David Seed. The American reviewers were scathing. Richard Brodhead, Andrew Delbanco, and Elizabeth Schultz all said or implied that I made up two lost books that Melville wrote, THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS, and Delbanco said I could not be trusted anywhere in any volume because I made these books up. Brenda Wineapple said I wrote fantasy biography like Edmund Morris's DUTCH. How nice to see the review by David Seed.
It is impossible to overstate Parker's
skill at organizing an enormous mass of data, much of it available for the
first time, into a coherent and engrossing narrative. The documentation for
this volume, like its predecessor, is impeccably scholarly and thorough, and
is given in concluding pages without the distraction of footnotes to disrupt
the flow of reading. Among the many bodies of information which Parker draws
on, the books which Melville knew deserve mention as a special resource. Every
chapter carries as its epigraph a quotation which Melville had marked in his
copy and these excerpts are just one textual signal that we are being given the
life of a mind. This is important to bear in mind because one of Parker's main
purposes in the present volume has been to fill in the gap which many accounts
of Melville's life have left, thereby implying that he did nothing in the four decades
before his death in 1891. . . .
In his last years Melville lived very much within his family and
Parker excels at giving a 'thick description' of his life-style, whether at
home, staying with relatives, or going on his travels. What astonishes in this
narrative is the sheer density of detail- everyone based on contemporary
documents - which gives a unique texture to this account of the last phase to
Melville's career. Parker's biography represents the ultimate achievement in
Melville scholarship and offers the reader a mine of information on one of the
formative American writers of the 19th century.
David Seed
Liverpool University, UK
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