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This compelling biography of Herman Melville, one of Am...)
This compelling biography of Herman Melville, one of America's most enigmatic literary figures, recounts a life full of adventure, hardship, and moral conflict. The grandson of two wealthy Revolutionary War heroes, Melville spent the first years of his affluent childhood in New York City, until his father went suddenly bankrupt in 1830, moved the family upstate, and died shortly thereafter. Melville escaped to sea in his early twenties, sailing first to England, then to Polynesia, where he found himself fleeing from cannibals, joining a mutiny, and frolicking with naked islanders. Much of his writing was based on his nautical adventures, but his novels were, for the most part, unsuccessful and misunderstood. His only close friend was Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he dedicated Moby-Dick. Later in life, Melville had to accept work as a low-level customs agent to support his wife and children. Newton Arvin's eminently readable biography beautifully captures the troubled, often reclusive man whose major works include Typee, Omoo, "Bartleby the Scrivener," Billy Budd, and his indisputable masterpiece, Moby-Dick. This winner of the 1950 National Book Award, Herman Melville is "the wisest and most balanced single piece of writing on Melville" -- The New York Times "....a superb exercise of critical scholarship and an ornament to American letters." -- Saturday Review of Literature
Frederic Newton Arvin was an American literary critic and academic.
Background
Frederic Newton Arvin was born on August 23, 1900 in Valparaiso, Indiana, United States. He was the son of Frederick Arvin, an insurance salesman, and Jessie Hawkins.
By 1906 Arvin's father and older brother were spending little time at home, so he grew up in Valparaiso among women: his mother, grandmother, and four sisters.
He became close friends with a neighbor, David Lilienthal, and in a few years they were discussing literature and national issues, and writing a magazine together.
Education
After graduating from Valparaiso High School, Arvin entered Harvard, where his older brother had done graduate work and at which Lilienthal had enrolled the year before.
Despite periods of ill health, he was an outstanding student.
Arvin graduated with a B. A. summa cum laude from Harvard in 1921 and taught at Detroit Country Day School before accepting an instructorship in English at Smith College in 1922.
Career
In 1920 he sent one of his essays to Van Wyck Brooks, associate editor of the Freeman, who immediately recognized him as "a critic by nature" and assigned him book reviews. Under Brooks' continuing encouragement, Arvin published reviews and essays--chiefly about American writers--in the Freeman as well as in the New York Herald Tribune, the Independent, and the Atlantic Monthly.
Brooks told Arvin that he was a born critic and he would be a distinguished one. The remark was prescient.
Promoted to assistant professor, Arvin traveled in Europe in the summer of 1929 and that year published The Heart of Hawthorne's Journals, an anthology of which he was editor, and Hawthorne, a landmark biographical and critical interpretation of the writer's obsession with guilt. During the Great Depression Arvin became increasingly concerned with social and political questions: he worked for a local American Federation of Teachers union, published essays on "Literature and Social Change" and "The Writer as Partisan, " spoke on "Literature and Propaganda, " and joined the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners.
He received national attention when, on September 11, 1932, he pledged to vote Communist along with such other writers as Lincoln Steffens, John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, and Theodore Dreiser.
Promoted to associate professor in 1933, Arvin received a Guggenheim fellowship for 1935-1936 and began a study of Walt Whitman's social thought. His Whitman (1938) was generally thought to have transcended the socialist ideology that inspired it.
Meanwhile Arvin had begun in 1930 a long association with Yaddo, the writer's colony near Saratoga Springs, New York, where he met such lifelong friends as Louis Kronenberger, Granville Hicks, William Maxwell, and Malcolm Cowley.
Never in strong physical or emotional health himself, Arvin had a nervous breakdown after he divorced with his wife, and underwent treatment in sanitariums the following spring.
He became a professor, with tenure, in 1941. Arvin's literary life gradually resumed with all its intensity. Having been elected to the Yaddo board of directors in 1939, he now befriended such younger writers as Carson McCullers and Truman Capote. His reviews and essays appeared frequently in the New Republic, the Nation, and the Partisan Review. He edited Hawthorne's Short Stories (1946) and Moby Dick (1948). Herman Melville (1950), a critical biography and perhaps his finest work, won a National Book Award.
In his acceptance speech Arvin celebrated both Melville, who "spoke out for the 'august dignity' of the democratic man, " and Ralph Waldo Emerson, "who cried out, again and again, on behalf of the free spirit of man and against the brutal, power-hungry and inhumane forces that would enslave that spirit. "
Arvin was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in February 1952. He next undertook a book-length study of Emerson but was plagued by illnesses for several years. To a friend he wrote of the "recurrent sickness (of the mind, that is) that took me to hospitals some four or five times and involved me in 'treatments' that were sometimes worse than the sickness itself. "
Arvin was accused of "un-American activities" and abandoned his Emerson book but published one of his finest essays, "The House of Pain: Emerson and the Tragic Sense, " in the Hudson Review in 1959 and became Mary Augusta Jordan Professor at Smith in February 1960.
Arvin was subjected to a police raid on suspicion of homosexuality and was subsequently arrested with two other Smith College professors on obscenity and lewdness charges in September 1960. Despite protests and letters from nationally known scholars and colleagues, Arvin was convicted, fined, and given a suspended sentence.
He retired from Smith in 1961. Although suffering repeatedly from ill health, he managed to complete and publish Longfellow: His Life and Work (1963) shortly before his death, in Northampton, Massachussets Arvin was respected by most of the prominent literary scholars, critics, and editors of his time. He corresponded with such scholars as Austin Warren, Lewis Mumford, Lionel Trilling, and Merle Curti. His friendships with Brooks, Kronenberger, and Hicks remained close; and he came to know many younger critics, such as Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, and R. W. B. Lewis.
Despite the repeated torments of his personal life, he continued to affirm with Emerson and Melville "the free spirit of man. " He was hard at work editing a four-volume history of American literature and writing a new book on Hawthorne when he died.
Achievements
Arvin achieved national recognition for his publications and studies of individual nineteenth-century American authors.
Arvin celebrated the democracy and free spirit of man.
Personality
Arvin described himself as a girlish, timid, shrinking, weak, and unadventuresome man, but his innumerable friends knew him as witty, amusing, affectionate, and formidably learned.
Brooks described him as a quiet man with a violent mind, who would gladly have stood against a wall and faced a fusillade for his convictions. Daniel Aaron praised him for his range of comprehension, richness in reference and analogy, quiet responsibility, and justice.
Connections
Arvin married Mary Jordan Garrison on August 12, 1932, but the marriage proved unhappy.
His wife suffered a nervous collapse in 1938 and entered a sanitarium the next year.
