The stories by Delmore Schwartz—those, too, have an air of tragedy about them, how could they not with this legacy hanging over them? But some have his genius and originality, the mania he medicated and the melancholy he staved off with equal vigor. None of the stories in the collection recently published by New Directions, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories, ends on a high note. In the title story, Schwartz’s most famous, a boy abruptly and unhappily comes of age; in “America! America!” the narrator realizes no one truly knows himself, or his fate; in “New Year’s Eve” a party on that night ends drunkenly, with the protagonist proclaiming his “complete hopelessness of perception and feeling.” Schwartz had a knack for unhappy endings long before his own. Still, the new collection of Schwartz’s stories, with a preface by his former student at Syracuse University, Lou Reed, and explanatory material by Schwartz’s biographer, James Atlas, and his friend Irving Howe, is a happy occasion. Not every story is a winner, but the title story is still a knockout.

“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” was written in 1935, when Schwartz was 21 years old. It is largely autobiographical. As the story begins, the narrator, a young man, says, “I feel as if I were in a motion picture theater, the long arm of light crossing the darkness and spinning, my eyes fixed on the screen.” The sense of the conditional, the “I feel as if,” mixes with the concrete throughout the story, giving it its dreamlike feel. A few sentences later he tells us the exact date: “It is Sunday afternoon, June 12th, 1909, and my father is walking down the quiet streets of Brooklyn on his way to visit my mother.” The young man relaxes into watching the film of his parents: “I am anonymous, and I have forgotten myself.” The movie is like a “drug.” He projects himself into his father’s consciousness: Does he want to propose, to be married? Then into his grandfather’s: Will this young man make a good husband for his daughter? As the young man watches his parents’ courtship, he begins to weep. Is it because his father is already lying to his mother about how much money he is making? It’s unclear, and suddenly they are at their destination, Coney Island.

On the boardwalk, watching his parents staring at the ocean, the young man has another outburst of weeping. His neighbor reassures him that it’s only a movie, but he’s despondent. He leaves the theater, and when he returns his father proposes. He can’t help but rage at the screen, “Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.” The story goes on with more of his parents’ Coney Island antics, and ends with the young man emerging into the daylight. Suddenly we are back to reality: it is “the bleak winter morning of my 21st birthday, the windowsill shining with its lip of snow, and the morning already begun.” He has not been able to stop his parents from ruining their lives, and by extension, both creating and ruining his.

“In Dreams” startled the editors of the fledging Partisan Review, reborn in 1937 as a non-Communist literary magazine, who recognized it as a masterpiece. They published it as the lead piece in their first issue along with contributions by Wallace Stevens, Edmund Wilson, James Agee, Lionel Trilling, Pablo Picasso, and Mary McCarthy, among others. Editor Dwight MacDonald wrote in an obituary of Schwartz, “I think the story deserved its primacy. It is as good as a story can be, I’d say after reading it again for the fifth or sixth time, comparable with Kafka, Babel, or Through the Looking Glass.” When the story was published in book form along with Schwartz’s other stories and poems a year later, Schwartz received praise from Stevens and his hero, T.S. Eliot, as well as his contemporaries Robert Lowell and John Berryman, both of whom became his intimate friends. Thus was his brilliance established, and Schwartz went off to teach and do graduate work at Harvard (where he would never finish a degree). He married his childhood sweetheart, Gertrude Buckman, a marriage that would end acrimoniously.

Schwartz used his background again and again in his stories: his parents, Harry and Rose Schwartz, were immigrant Jews who never should have married. They separated when he was seven and his younger brother was four, and their constant fighting and propensity to try and get Schwartz to take sides haunted him his entire life. His father, a philanderer, made money in the real estate business but lost it in the Depression. They separated yet Rose was unwilling to give Harry a divorce for many years (Schwartz writes about a family very much like his own in “The Child is the Meaning of This Life”). Eventually when they did divorce Harry moved to Chicago and remarried. Delmore then split his time between the lower-middle-class world of New York’s Washington Heights, the setting for most of his stories, and spent summers with his father and his new wife.

Schwartz’s Jewishness is a given in his writing; the world of his stories is the world of his family, with their constant squabbling and misapprehensions and dreams of “refinement.” As Shenandoah Fish, the narrator in “America! America!” describes the tension between his generation and that of his parents: “But since he was an author of a certain kind, he was a monster to them. They would be pleased to see his name in print and to hear that he was praised at times, but they would never be interested in what he wrote. They might open one book, and turn the pages; but then perplexity and boredom would take hold of them, and they would say, perhaps from politeness and certainly with humility, that this was too deep for them, or too dry.” The Jews of Washington Heights would not—would never—understand Delmore’s downtown friends, with their ever-splintering Marxism, their Freudian family romance, their worship of Eliot, of Yeats, of the other moderns still very much in vogue as Schwartz tumbled from teaching job to teaching job, his behavior becoming more erratic and his writing less compelling.

Though “Dreams” and subsequent publications in Partisan Review assured Schwartz’s name would be linked with those of Macdonald, William Barrett, Phillip Rahv, and the other New York Intellectuals, Schwartz was equal parts clown and critic. Macdonald writes, “He was a master of the great American folk art of kidding, an impractical joker—words were his medium—outraging dignity and privacy, present company most definitely not excepted, pressing the attack until it reached a comic grandeur that had even the victim laughing.” Rahv remembers him as less jovial. “Saturnine by temperament, he took an exceedingly comfortless view of the conduct of human beings, of whose motives he was chronically distrustful; and his habit was to denounce endlessly what he saw as their moral lapses even while taking care to exculpate himself.” Though these might seem like dialectically opposed views, one bitter, one sweet, they are oddly consistent with the reminiscences of Schwartz’s other friends. He was the joker and the cynic, the sulker and the jester. William Barrett, in his memoir, The Truants, clarifies that Rahv’s piece pertains more to Schwartz in the years of his decline, and that Rahv and Schwartz’s relationship was always somewhat contentious. Schwartz was known for this observation about Rahv: “‘Philip Rahv does have scruples,’ said very reflectively and gravely; a judicious and reflective pause; then, with a sudden wide grin, ‘but he never lets them stand in his way.’”

Of all of the stories about Schwartz, the most famous is Saul Bellow’s Pulitzer Prize- winning 1975 novel Humbolt’s Gift but the most moving is Jean Stafford’s 1948 short story “Children Are Bored on Sunday.” Stafford’s story too has a touch of the autobiographical about it. After her split from her first husband, Schwartz’s friend Robert Lowell, Stafford spent time in a mental hospital and emerged a much more fragile and self-conscious creature. In “Children” the Stafford character, Emma, encounters a character much like Schwartz, called Alfred Eisenburg, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sunday afternoon, a place she had hoped to be alone, free from the judging eyes of her old crowd. She remembers the parties, much like the one Schwartz described in “New Year’s Eve.” Schwartz: “On this memorable evening and at this New Year’s party, the idiom which prevailed might perhaps be said to be that of unpleasant cleverness.” A few hours later at the same party, Stafford: “The most surprising thing of all about these parties was that every now and again, in the middle of the urgent, general conversation, this cream of the enlightened was horribly curdled, and an argument would end, quite literally, in a bloody nose or a black eye.” Emma remembered flirting with Eisenburg at one of those parties, though she couldn’t remember whether he was a painter, a writer, a composer, or a philosopher. She did remember, though, that he too had been having a bad time—a divorce, no money, visits to a psychoanalyst. By the end of the story Emma has felt herself a kindred spirit with Eisenberg: “And there was no doubt about it; he had heard of her collapse and he saw in her face that she had heard of his.” They go off to find someplace for a drink, to collapse together, perhaps, or at least to take comfort in the other’s wounded presence.

Schwartz once wrote that “the ideas of success and failure are the two most important things in America.” In this he echoed the thinking of one of his literary idols, F. Scott Fitzgerald, a figure who haunted him, according to his friend Barrett: “Fitzgerald was the symbolic figure of early success that had then deserted the writer, and as such he had taken possession of Delmore’s imagination. Fitzgerald’s saying that ‘in American lives there are no second acts,’ ran as a refrain of despair through Delmore’s conversation.” Those who have early success are not doomed to such despair, but they do have that higher perch from which to fall. Schwartz would never again write a story as good as “In Dreams,” would never love a woman as much as his first wife, would alienate his friends over the course of a long and destructive mental illness. Yet he has inspired works from Stafford’s and Bellow’s to John Berryman’s Dream Songs and Lou Reed’s “European Son” and “My House.” Schwartz’s life appropriately muddles the line between success and failure in an almost dreamlike way; he has had a second act of sorts, just not one he has been around to enjoy.

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From 1917 until 1925, T.S. Eliot worked in a bank. A simple, declarative sentence, a biographical fact. Not the subject of dissertations or the reason two hefty volumes of The Letters of T.S. Eliot (Volume 1: 1898-1922; Volume 2: 1923-5) have just been published, but along with his disastrous and draining marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood, Eliot’s employment at Lloyd’s Bank of London was the driving force of his life in the years of these letters, until he left Lloyd’s in October 1925 for a position as an editor at the publishing house Faber & Gwyer (later to be Faber & Faber).

There is a general antipathy about hearing too much about a writer’s day job once he has become successful, and Eliot’s successes piled up as he rose at Lloyd’s: Prufrock and Other Observations was published in 1915; his essays collected in The Sacred Wood in 1921; The Waste Land stormed both sides of the Atlantic in 1922, etc. Like Eliot at the bank, we know Wallace Stevens sold insurance, but nobody wants to think about the poet at the water cooler, or, even worse, pouring over actuarial tables. Same goes for William Carlos Williams being a doctor: Do we want a man so skilled with words to perform our annual physicals? It’s fine for a writer to have a quirky or strange day job, like nude model, “oyster pirate,” even garbage man. Yet the point of the writer’s life must remain to end up at the writer’s desk somewhere, with all that nonsense left behind.

Eliot subverts that plot by continuing to work at the bank even after his poems are successful and he’s made a substantial reputation as a critic. For Eliot to show up every day at a bank, and, as his letters confirm, find the work more conducive to writing poetry and criticism than taking a more literary job might be (and certainly better for his health than starving for his art), upends the way we want writers’ careers to progress. Eliot, the modernist upstart, was also a timid—and incorrigible—bourgeois.

Eliot considered himself lucky to have landed the job at Lloyd’s through a connection of his in-law’s. After a taxing and poorly paid stint as a school teacher the job at the bank was financially, at least, a godsend. He wrote to his mother in March 1917:

I am now earning £2 10s a week for sitting in an office from 9.15 to 5 with an hour for lunch, and tea served in the office. It’s not a princely salary, but there are good prospects of a rise [raise] as I become more useful. Perhaps it will surprise you to hear that I enjoy the work. It is not nearly so fatiguing as schoolteaching, and is more interesting, I have a desk and a filing cabinet in a small room with another man. The filing cabinet is my province, for it contains balance sheets of all the foreign banks with which Lloyd’s does business. These balances I file and tabulate in such a way as to show the progress or decline of every bank from year to year.

Not only was Eliot at the bank, but as the letter above demonstrates, he was happy to be there. A certain pride creeps in to his accounting of his accounting: the salary, the hours, the filing cabinet which is “my province.” To read Eliot’s letters is to get a full picture of the routine demands of this job, which he clung to despite rigorous efforts from his friends and supporters to free him from the shackles of international finance.

Eliot resists the characterization of a writer as willing to forgo the niceties of daily life in order to make art. What he wants are not luxuries—the early letters testify over and over to the Eliots’ impoverishment despite Tom’s bank wages, with thank-you letters to his American relatives for sending checks that fill in the financial gaps so he can have new underwear and pajamas, not brandy and cigars. Rather, Eliot craves security. He writes again and again of trying to free himself from worry, for his own but even more for the nervous and unhealthy Vivien’s sake. Has any writer (Stevens excepted) ever had so much anxious correspondence about life insurance? Eliot is prostrate over what will happen to Vivien if anything should happen to him.

The multiple breakdowns both Eliots suffer from stem from anxiety over finances as much as any other source.

“A Peaceful, But Very Interesting Pursuit”

Eliot started out as a clerk in Colonial and Foreign department of Lloyd’s “on the false pretense of being a linguist” (one supposes his Harvard Sanskrit probably did not get too much use, though he did know French and Italian, and picked up a little Norwegian, Spanish, Dutch, and Swedish). He took the job because he thought it would leave him time to write both verse and criticism in the evenings. In 1914 he was already contributing to the New Statesman, and the promise of work in the American magazines like the Dial and the Century were on the horizon. Commissions from British magazines would soon follow.

Both Eliots’ health improved once he started working at the bank, a fact which is not to be underestimated. The letters are in large part a catalogue of ailments and unsuccessful cures, especially Vivien’s. But the bank, in the early years, exerts a stabilizing force on the couple: “Vivien was very anxious about my health while I was at home—it seemed to get worse and worse; and now I am better and more cheerful and find she is much happier. Then too I have felt more creative lately.” The bank has stirred Eliot to write poetry again along with his critical essays. Eliot is genuinely interested in his banking work as well, as he writes to his father: “I am absorbed during the daytime by the balance sheets of foreign banks. It is a peaceful, but very interesting pursuit, and involves some use of reasoning powers.” Vivien, perhaps over-enthusiastically, goes so far as to write to Eliot’s mother that Tom is considering banking asa “money-making career!” She continues, “We are all very much surprised at this development, but not one of his friends has failed to see, and to remark upon, the great chance in Tom’s health, appearance, spirits, and literary productiveness since he went in for Banking. So far, it has obviously suited him. He is extremely interested in finance, and I believe he has a good deal of hitherto unexpected ability in that direction.” Vivien prattles on that she feels in a couple of years Eliot might be able to continue at the bank both making money and producing poetry, as he has written five “most excellent poems in the course of one week” and oh, what a miracle that would be.

An Anti-Romantic Poet

Yet one letter after Vivien’s above, a snake creeps into the garden: Eliot decides to take a contributing editor job with the Egoist, a monthly magazine which has been publishing his poems. It is this extra task that leads to Eliot’s return to the condition of “overwork” in December 1917, one the letters find him in over and over again. The position with the Egoist marks the beginning of Eliot’s time as an editor, a job he will pursue and refuse over the next eight years. In March 1919 John Middleton Murry offers him the assistant editor post at the Athenaeum. Eliot writes to his mother that Murry “is very anxious to get me as assistant, and says he would rather have me than anyone in England.” Eliot goes on to list the advantages and disadvantages of the offer. He passes over the advantages—more money, social prestige—quite quickly. But he is clear on the disadvantages: “4. The work might be more exhausting than the bank work; and would have no more relation to my own serious work than the bank work has. 5. I have lately been shifted into new and much more interesting work at the bank which is not routine but research – practically economics and am in fact a kind of bureau by myself.” Plus there is the stability of the bank, as Murry cannot guarantee more than two years, and no raises in pay. Eliot is a an anti-Romantic poet: not only does he believe that “English literature ends well before 1800,” he has no tolerance for risk. No Byron off to Greece to fight or Shelley thwarting sexual convention is he. In his criticism and his life, he remains a conservative man.

So Eliot stays at the bank. As he tells his mother, there are two main reasons, one practical and one ego-based: “I should be worrying all the time about whether it would succeed. The bank work offers prospects of a very good salary. I know the people and like them, and they like me very much. I know where I am with them.” Then Eliot writes of being above the scurries of journalism, retaining a social position by working at a bank. “I can influence London opinion and English literature in a better way. I am known to be disinterested…There is a small and select public which regards me as the best living critic, as well as the best living poet, in England.” He continued to publish criticism and poetry and get raises at the bank, and at the beginning of 1923 Eliot became the head of the Intelligence Department, making it harder for him to leave just as his friends were pressuring him to do just that.

The Failure of Bel Esprit

Bel Esprit was a scheme hatched by Ezra Pound and others to enable Eliot to leave the bank in 1922. The plan was to find thirty guarantors of £10 per year, giving Eliot a “salary” of £300. A circular Pound wrote in March 1922 stated: “[TSE] certainly is not asking favours, our plan was concocted without his knowledge. The facts are that his bank work has diminished his output of poetry, and that his prose has grown tired. Last winter he broke down and was sent off for three months’ rest. During that time he wrote Waste Land, a series of poems, probably the finest that the modern movement in English has produced, at any rate as good as anything that has been done since 1900, and which certainly loses nothing by comparison with the best work of Keats, Browning or Shelley.” Yet Eliot is opposed to Bel Esprit on the grounds that it will not provide the stability that the bank does. “I see no advantage for myself in an indefinite income for five or ten years only,” he writes his friend Richard Aldington in June 1922, and the scheme falls apart when it is made public. What embarrasses Eliot most about the revelation of Bel Esprit in the media is that it might be inferred that he left the bank, though privately he writes to Pound in November 1922, “Of course I want to leave the Bank, and of course the prospect of staying there for the rest of my life is abominable to me. It ought not be necessary to say this.” The rest of his letter, however, reiterates the reasons he cannot abide Bel Esprit: no long-term security for himself or for Vivien.

It is in part the business skills he learned at the bank which enable Eliot to free himself from it. He starts a quarterly periodical called The Criterion in 1922, and his correspondence becomes a window into his vision for this venture. All the while he tries to get his patron, Lady Rothmere, to give him a salary for the enormous amount of work it takes to run The Criterion (and enlists others to persuade her as well). But it is interest in him as an shrewd editor—and writer, of course, as he is a regular contributor to The Criterion—which piques the interest of Geoffrey Faber in Eliot as a potential member of his publishing firm. After they agree on terms, Eliot finally has his way out of the bank, with a job that has security and future prospects.

In his letter of resignation, Eliot writes that he “must seek some employment which would give me the time to attend to my domestic anxieties,” meaning Vivien’s deteriorating health. Curiously, he does not mention writing as a reason for his exit. The tone of the letter is remarkable, though, for its humility, and sincere (or sincere-sounding) regret on having to leave a place which has been kind to him. It is not throwing off shackles but begging forgiveness. He writes of regretting not seeing the Intelligence Division to its fruition, and of letting down his colleagues there. He names particular coworkers whose “abundant generosity and sympathy I shall never forget.” And he sums up by saying, “At this time, all of my feelings are numb; but I know that it is, and I fear always will be, very painful for me to have severed my connection with Lloyd’s Bank in this way—a way which could justly be qualified as desertion rather than resignation.” Eliot leaves Lloyd’s Bank the same way he came: gratefully.

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Unpacking My Library

In his essay “Unpacking My Library” Walter Benjamin, a critic who knew no school or home in his lifetime, lovingly describes his book collection. An aphoristic writer, Benjamin peppers his “talk about book collecting” (the essay’s subtitle) with all sorts of gems about books, writing, collecting, reading, and memory. To wit, “A real library…is always somewhat impenetrable and at the same time uniquely itself… The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership—for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.” Collecting was the point, not just reading: Benjamin gloried in the acquisition.

If you encounter Benjamin’s essay in the collection Illuminations, with an introduction by Hannah Arendt describing the circumstances of Benjamin’s life, however, “Library” takes on another dimension. Though Benjamin was a homme de lettres who pursued the life of the mind with vigor and zeal, his material circumstances and the political times in which he lived made this pursuit neigh well impossible. Benjamin was a German Jew born in 1892 who spent much of his adult life as a refugee, making the book collection he hauled from country to country an even more remarkable feat. In “Unpacking My Library” he is literally taking the books out of cartons and fantasizing about them. Arendt claims that Benjamin’s collecting had a “fetish character.” Benjamin imbues the book with totemic powers (“magic encyclopedia”), and the collection as a whole with a sense of wonder and collective identity (“uniquely itself”).

So there is a blunt irony in the title of the new anthology featuring sumptuous photographs of thirteen well-known writers’ bookshelves also being called Unpacking My Library. Unlike poor Benjamin, whose life was one of impoverishment and alienation, these are people who have made it, the literary establishment, and their bookshelves are emblems of their success. The presentation of the book in Unpacking is such that books take on a fetishistic quality in a literal way: call it library porn. They are seductively posed flat on their sides or perfectly aligned with their coordinated spines facing out, lovingly lit, labeled by category, encased in plastic, nestled in exotic bookends. You are waiting for one to beckon to you fetchingly accessorized with a lamp, a cozy chair and a snifter of something delicious: the literary equivalent of a nightie and a bearskin rug. It’s refreshing after Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein’s white floor-to- ceiling, arranged by category and author, bourgeois bookshelf masterpieces to see Phillip Pullman’s piles on the floor and Junot Diaz’s hodgepodge of vertical and horizontal paperbacks and hardcovers. They, and slovenly Edmund White, are the exceptions: the rule is books lovingly arranged, organized, fetishized. Unpacking is coffee-table fodder for the nerd set.

The format of Unpacking is a question-and-answer session in which editor Leah Price asks each writer about his library, followed by the writer choosing his “Top Ten Books,” with the photographs of the actual bookshelves after that. The pictures are really the soul of the book: a better arrangement would have had the interviews come last, since the temptation to flip straight to the shelves is pretty irresistible. Just like walking into someone’s house, it’s on the shelves that most of the best discoveries are made: Gary Shteyngart keeps his Sopranos DVDs between David Copperfield and the Divine Comedy; someone is reading Camus in French in Claire Massud and James Wood’s house; Jonthan Lethem’s Peanuts collections live right above his Kafka. Oh, and either Lev Grossman or Sophie Gee has been reading the Twilight books.

Editor Leah Price

The interviews get a bit repetitive after a while (Price asks most of the writers the same questions) but do have some revelatory moments. Alison Bechdel reveals- slash-explains the function of the covetable Atlas Ergonomic Bookstand on her shelf which she got “to facilitate reading in tandem with eating. I got tired of trying to prop a book open and use a knife and fork at the same time.” Rebecca Goldstein shudders at the thought of putting vases or other objects on a shelf with books, saying “it seemed to me to qualify as what philosophers call a ‘category mistake.’” Married couple Goldstein and Pinker are among the liveliest interviews in the book, along with having those incredibly enviable shelves: in fact, Pinker loves the shelves so much he did a testimonial for them for a TV show called I Want That which ended up on YouTube though, confusingly, there are vases on the shelves in the video. Pinker and Pullman are also the only interviewees who cop to reading ebooks (Pullman likes to read thrillers on his Kindle).

The most refreshingly non-reverential writer interviewed is Edmund White, who not only regularly clears out his sagging shelves and donates to charitable bookstore Housing Works but has no compunction about throwing a book in the garbage “if I truly despise” it. After all of the precious talk of categorization and annotation and cataloguing and custom-made shelving (perhaps the most enthralling and slightly nauseating detail is Shteyngart’s confession that “I’m big on sniffing books. The old Soviet ones have this really strong smell, reminding me, for some reason, of tomato soup in a cheap Soviet cafeteria”), White reminds us that these libraries should not only be collections but workshops. “You could say I’m pretty hostile to books as objects and space-grabbers and dust-collectors,” White says, and it’s so contrary to the sentimentalism and fetishizing of the other writers the reader almost gasps at the thought books could be anything but worshipped. Or sniffed.

The idea behind Unpacking My Library is that we can get to know writers better by peeking at their bookshelves and hearing them talk about their attitude toward book collecting, or maybe book owning is a better term. One of Price’s better questions asks what books are not in the photographs (lots of cookbooks). Critic James Wood confesses: “I have a separate bookcase for ‘unread books I want to read sometime soon.’ Of course, it’s enormous and dispiriting.” That is the spirit of Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library” peeking through this Unpacking My Library, a sentiment he could understand lurking behind these bourgeois bookshelves.

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Nathaniel Philbrick opens this love letter to Moby-Dick with a strange moment. Melville inserts himself into his novel at several points, but only once does he record the exact time of composition, when he was writing about the wonders of whale spouts “sprinkling and mystifying the gardens of the deep.” It was at, “fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1850.” Philbrick characterizes this as a glimpse of Melville in flagrante delicto while composing his Great Book, and asserts it is his favorite moment in Moby-Dick. Yet Philbrick then must qualify that the words were actually written in 1851, a fact he passes over quickly in order to make the case for the feeling of immediacy and intimacy the scene gives him: “Whenever I come upon that sentence, I feel that I am there, with Melville, as he creates the greatest American novel ever written.” It is this tension between fact and feeling that permeates Philbrick’s book; a historian, he is most comfortable in the realm of hardcore information. Yet in order to write a polemic, a book that will answer the question of why read Moby-Dick, some emotional appeal is necessary. In such situations, however, Philbrick sounds pedantic rather than persuasive, more like a schoolmarm than a seducer.

In order to convince his reader in a little over a hundred pages to pick up a novel Philbrick admits is both “too long and maddeningly digressive” despite its many merits, Philbrick has little time or space to waste. His strength is in characterizing and distilling Melville’s book. He describes how Melville immersed himself in treatises about whaling specifically and seafaring in general, and as a result, Moby-Dick is as much a compendium of cytology (the study of whales) as it is a great novel: “The book is so encyclopedic and detailed that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the middle of the nineteenth century.” This might win over a few curious souls, or industrious aliens.

Philbrick also writes well about the influence of the political climate of the 1850s, especially the events leading up to the Civil War, like the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850-1 (Melville’s father-in-law, Judge Lemuel Shaw, was the target of protests when he sent a captured fugitive slave from Boston back to the South). Philbrick argues that Melville makes the ships in Moby-Dick, especially the Pequod, where most of the action takes place, models of interracial harmony where what the narrator of the novel, Ishmael, calls a “democratic dignity” prevailed among the men.

Nathaniel Philbrick

The influences on Melville’s writing of Moby-Dick are summarized neatly by Philbrick, including the vital facts of his career up until its publication. Most critically, Melville had been at sea himself. Philbrick cites Melville writing in the voice of Ishmael, “I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” Melville’s South Sea adventures inspired his first book, the bestselling Typee (1846). The author’s subsequent books, however, had not fared as well artistically or commercially. Frankly, he needed another hit. Moby-Dick would not strike a chord with the reading public or critics for many years. By the time of Melville’s death, it had sold 3,715 copies. Not until after WWI, when readers and writers enveloped the novel in a virtual “tidal wave of praise,” did the outline of the reputation the novel has now become visible.

When Melville embarked on Moby-Dick, he had just relocated his family to the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts, quite near where Nathaniel Hawthorne lived. The friendship between the two writers was instrumental to Melville’s composition of the novel. In a well-known essay Melville wrote about Hawthorne he praised Hawthorne’s “great power of blackness.” Philbrick argues that it is a short leap from Melville’s admiration for Hawthorne’s artistry, and his personality, which was also mercurial and resistant to intimacy, to his creation of the blackness in the Pequod’s captain, Ahab, whose monomaniacal quest for the white whale Moby-Dick forms the backbone of the novel. The friendship between the two writers was so important that Philbrick asserts, in a bossy aside: “I would go so far as to insist that reading Moby-Dick is not enough. You must read the letters [between Hawthorne and Melville] to appreciate the personal and artistic forces that made the book possible.” That is a tall order for a guy already pushing a mammoth novel in a slim book. Must we read the letters too? This is the taskmaster Philbrick coming out, or the schoolmarm, and he is a poor advocate for the cause of Melville’s novel.

Other literary influences Philbrick points to for Melville were Milton, Virgil, Shakespeare and the Bible, begging the conclusion that if you are going to write big, read big. But this leads to one of Philbrick’s more puzzling assertions: “Melville’s example demonstrates the wisdom of waiting to read the classics. Coming to a great book on your own after having accumulated essential life experience can make all the difference.” Although this is said in the context of Melville rewriting Moby-Dick, it is odd in a book about a classic. Should we wait to read Moby-Dick as well until we have enough “essential life experience?”

This is another one of those pedantic, schoolmarm moments where Philbrick seems to be imparting wisdom yet by doing so he is undermining his argument. Attempts to seem too hip or contemporary—comparing Ahab to Saddam Hussein, saying Ahab “dials his charisma up to eleven” à la This Is Spinal Tap—also made this reader cringe a little. Melville doesn’t need contemporary branding.

Philbrick is most persuasive when he is being a conscientious historian about Melville and his process rather than a cheerleader for Moby-Dick. Though his book is an interesting companion to the novel, truly interested readers should skip Why Read Moby-Dick? and jump directly into the belly of Melville’s masterpiece.

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