Melville

On this day in 1851, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick was published. The British edition, entitled The Whale, had appeared the previous month, but through a sequence of error, poor judgment and bad timing, it had a rearranged and incomplete ending. This set off another sequence of error, poor judgment and bad timing, this time involving not the publishers but the critics, who looked upon the botched ending as the last straw in a book already too unusual and obscure. The upshot was that Melville's masterpiece, the book he was counting on to rescue his reputation and his finances, was so belittled and slandered in the crucial first weeks following publication in America that it never had a chance.

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Melville's next book was Pierre, or The Ambiguities, in part a dark, bitter satire about what happens to a writer who writes a masterpiece that no one appreciates. A fine book, though in the 1960s it was regarded as a failure. Thus I intended to write my PhD thesis on its brilliance when I entered grad school at the University of Oregon in 1966. Doing research my first year there, I discovered someone had beat me to the punch: a Univ. of Michigan grad student had just published a dissertation with my thesis! Par for the course, my advisor told me, but I was devastated. I dropped out of school. What on earth could I write about if not about the brilliance of Pierre? My personal life also was crumbling and changing. When I returned to grad school, it was as an MFA candidate in Fiction, later switching to Drama. What would have happened if that Michigan fellow had not beat me to the punch? I have no idea. And everything worked out fine in the end.