Volume 32, Number 12 · July 18, 1985
The Artist and His Audience
By John Updike
What does Melville's career tell us of the creative imagination but that it lies at the mercy of earthly circumstances? Melville wrote, in his dozen productive years, with extraordinary intensity, spending such long hours at his writing table that his health and sanity were feared for and his eyes became, in his words, 'tender as young sparrows.' Yet his youth held few hints of precocity or of literary concern; in 1850 he told Hawthorne, 'Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then & now, that I have not unfolded within myself.' The pre-Typee silence of this, in his father's words, 'amiable and docile' youth—compare Poe and Hawthorne and Bryant, all scribbling and published by their very early twenties—foreshadows the eventual return to silence when, at thirty-eight, after the publication of The Confidence-Man, Melville again succumbed to fatalism and intellectual passivity.
Feature, 4595 words
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