Melville and His Circle: The Last Years

With the exception of Billy Budd, which went unpublished in his lifetime, all of Herman Melville's best-known work dates from the early part of his career. However, even as disillusionment with publishers and a general withdrawal from society marked Melville's later years, he never ceased writing. Dillingham's study of the later Melville argues that the author found sufficient companionship in reading the works of like-minded souls as he contemplated both the beauty of art and the sacrifices necessary to create it. According to Dillingham, ""Melville's Circle"" ranges from Buddhist philosophy to the pessimism of Schopenhauer, from the Human Comedy of Balzac to the poetry of Matthew Arnold. Through study of Melville's personal copies of these works, Dillingham adroitly shows the connections between these authors and Melville's own later verse and prose. Dillingham is far less persuasive, however, in his occasional misguided attempts to posit a direct correlation between what the aging Melville read and what he wrote: Melville's later themes and motifs can mostly already be found in his earlier work, and there's no reason to think he had to look elsewhere to rediscover them. But Dillingham does present a surprisingly intimate portrait of the way a neglected writer nurtured his own inner life through the world of literature. (Nov.)