#omoo

To get away, out of our life. To cross a horizon into another life. No matter what life, so long as it is another life.”

Yesterday was Herman Melville’s birthday. He was born August 1, 1819, in New York City in a family of Revolutionary War heroes and once-prominent merchants. But the family when he was born the Melvilles were in decline.

He left school at 15 to became a bank clerk. He also tried farming and teaching, but it was when in 1837 he took to the sea for the first time that the Herman Melville will know began. He was just a cabin boy on a merchant ship bound for Liverpool with cotton, but he liked being at sea. Returning to New York and then in the West, he tried various jobs but found no “career.”

Returning to the East in1841, he signed up on the whaling shape the Acushnet, which spent several years in the Pacific. You would assume he loved this life since he wrote about it most famously later, but in fact, he did not. The Acushnet was a place of cruelties and he jumped ship in the Marquesas. There he was held in “friendly captivity” by the Polynesians. he escaped on an Australian whaler, which he also eventually abandoned and made his way to Hawaii and then back to the mainland. 

Returning to New York in1844, he was now 25 and he found there was an audience for his exotic sea stories in the islands. He wrote about his adventures in Polynesia, on whaling, and on life as a merchant mariner in his first novel, Typee. Publishers at first questioned the truthfulness of this non-fiction, but in print, it was an instant best-seller. He followed up quickly with a similar book, Omoo.

He married in 1847 and lived in New York with his younger brother and sister-in-law, their mother, and four of their sisters. 

His next book was a novel was very different from the first two successful books. It was a rather fantastical, romantic work called Mardi. This book was not a best-seller, but the Melvilles moved to a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts (which I plan to visit this month).

At the farm, he met Nathaniel Hawthorne and a friendship began (though it seems that Melville considered Hawthorne more of a friend than Hawthorne did.

Melville explored transcendentalism and allegorical writing and wrote at the farm what would be his masterpiece, Moby-Dick. 

The novel is an ambitious, lyrical, unconventional and epic story. He dedicated it to Hawthorne in “admiration for his genius.” But Moby-Dick, or the Whale got mixed reviews. Readers who had liked his two earliest books did not find the same thing in the new tale.

Considering its classic status today, Moby-Dick was the beginning of the end of his career as a novelist. His subsequent books were largely literary failures. He did some farming and wrote articles to pay the bills, but the family ended up returning to New York City in 1863.

Melville became a customs inspector and tried a  second literary life as a poet, writing a lot about the then raging Civil War. His first book of poetry was Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, which received praise but he never returned to the prominence of those first two books.

He never saw Moby-Dick reach the stature it has today, and his remaining stories and poems were largely ignored, including the posthumously published novel, Billy Budd. His literary revival began in the 1920s and Moby-Dick is now regarded as one of the greatest novels ever written. I didn't see any celebration of his 200th birthday, so I want to send this remembrance out into the universe for an author who has meant a lot to me.

I want to read a book a month this year, and I was successful in January! It might be kind of cheating because I started Omoo in November, but I read the bulk of it in January.

I was excited to read another Melville as I was obsessed with Moby Dick for a while and the only short stories of Melville's that I didn't love were Billy Budd and Benito Cereno. Omoo thankfully fell more in the Moby Dick camp of a kind of goofy and aloof but deathly interesting exposé with a first-person narrator that is faceless, backstoryless, and devoid of an internal monologue. Melville has a real talent for writing a novel that has a rich environment and so many witty turns of phrase and fascinating characters that it is still a page-turner despite having next to no plot.

I will say the excitement definitely picked up after the first quarter of the book - which might be my opinion because I could not for the life of me understand what the "round robin" was, and that is essential for understanding pretty much the entire conflict in the beginning. But pretty soon the narrator is gallivanting around the Society Islands meeting interesting people and describing the wildlife in minute detail. Melville makes you laugh while breaking down the tragic and doomed social, political, and economic woes of colonized Polynesia. And what do these woes matter to our adventurous sailor? For him, the tropics are a thrill and an excursion that he can leave with barely a second thought. The story is a poignant message about colonialism and the economic state of the 19th century, in Melville's uniquely delicious descriptive prose.

The edition that I read - Northwestern-Newberry - had some nerdy historical notes and an explanation on the text. There were some typos throughout the book and even one lone paragraph in the present tense instead of past tense, but the editors explained that they were using some editorial approach theorized by some guy in the 1800s about respecting original material and collating accurately. I'm not really sure, I might be an archivist but even that is dry for me. I did appreciate their sparse footnotes - too many can be a distraction!

Herman Melville, from Omoo