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One hundred and eighty-five years after he first set foot in New Bedford, Herman Melville is returning to the city.
He is returning as an inspired statue, a permanent memorial designed to display the enlightenment of the great 19th century evangelist of all cultures.
Together with the venerable sculpture of Frederick Douglass installed in Abolition Row Park three years ago, New Bedford now has monuments to the two men who were arguably the greatest progressive figures of early American literature.
For Melville especially, it’s been a long road back from the cultural obscurity he had been relegated to at the time of his death. When he died in 1891, all his books were out of print and his gravestone featured a blank manuscript scroll.
During the following 25 years Melville continued to be a mostly forgotten literary figure. His greatest works were complex and deeply meditative tomes, fictional scriptures not easily accessible, even to the great reading cultures of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Slowly but surely though, as a more secular era came into full force in the 1920s, Melville’s reputation began to revive. There was renewed interest in “Moby-Dick” as a great American epic and the discovery of the manuscript of the novella “Billy Budd” among his family’s papers, exploded with perhaps even more critical fervor.
As the century wore on, some of Melville’s short stories — “Bartelby the Scrivener, “Benito Cereno,” and “The Confidence-Man” — began to grow in stature as Melville scholarship expanded and flourished. Even the post-Civil War poetry that Melville turned to when he had become an utter failure as a fiction writer were increasingly seen as literary works of the first order. He wrote “Battle Pieces,” a collection of Civil War poems, and “Clarel,” an epic poem about a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in these later years. Neither of them sold any better than his fiction.
After Melville’s reputation finally began to get the artistic attention it deserved, two things happened in New Bedford to reset his relationship to the city.
The first was the launch of the Moby-Dick Marathon in 1997.
Irwin Marks, a museum volunteer from Acushnet, had the idea (which also had been done in other places). Though it was not the first marathon, New Bedford’s 25-hour annual reading took off like no other. Its dedication to plowing through the 800-odd page book in the same setting where Melville’s novel launched seemed to be particularly appropriate. Something about reading about Ahab’s mad obsession, spoken aloud in the middle of a dark January night in this old port city, spoke to people.
The second event connected to the raising of New Bedford’s awareness of its great connection to Melville was the decision of the Melville Society to form a Cultural Project and locate its archive and primary programming in New Bedford.
They chose the Whaling Museum as the place that could best honor and sustain Melville’s legacy, according to Robert K. Wallace, the project’s co-founder. But a second important ingredient in their decision, he said, was that the city had always been a multi-cultural community that reflected the multi-cultural legacy Melville encountered on whaling ships and across the world.
So this week, the city will dedicate the Melville statue on the grounds of the Seamen’s Bethel where Ishmael prayed before he went to sea. This rendition of Melville is an image that could well work its way into the national psyche as the great writer’s popularity continues to grow.
Stefanie Rocknak based her creation on Father Mapple’s sermon in Chapter 9 of “Moby-Dick.” Like Jonah spending three days in a whale’s belly before being spit up, Melville (his alter ego Ishmael) spent three days in the climactic hunt for the white whale. But like Jonah, Melville emerged a different man, enlightened, if you will. His baptism by fire showed him who the real heroes were, men like Queequeg (the cannibal), and who the real villains were, men like the murderous ship captain (Ahab).
Mayor Jon Mitchell’s belief that the city needed a Melville statue is largely responsible for this achievement for New Bedford. He talks about the prominence it will give New Bedford as the place most closely identified with Melville, in terms of branding for tourism and reputation.
Mitchell notes that “Moby-Dick” is seen as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of American novels and said it is identified with America’s great enterprise and swashbuckling cultures.
That’s all true. But I’ll argue that “Moby-Dick” is a great work world-wide because it is an epic about the wide diversity of humanity and its manifestations of both good and evil. Half-way through the 19th century, Melville was portraying people of ostensibly primitive cultures in the light and people of so-called civilized ones in shadow. He was clearly ahead of his time in that sense.
That is not to say that there aren’t plenty of tropes in Melville’s work that today would be considered racist and sexist. There are. He was a man of his time, but he transcended that bigotry with his ultimate message of universality.
It is also good to remember that Melville’s editors forced him to remove a significant portion of his first work, the South Seas nonfiction adventure story, “Typee.” Anything that criticized missionaries, economic exploitation and colonialism, was taken out, according to Dr. Wallace, a literature and arts professor at Northern Kentucky University. I’d say Melville decided to circle back and address those issues in “Moby-Dick,” “Benito Cereno” and “Billy Budd.”
Concurrent with the statue unveiling this week will be the Whaling Museum’s four-day “Melville in Our Seaport” event.
The extensive programing will include scholarly discussions, a talk by Adrienne LaFrance, the executive editor of The Atlantic, and a virtual discussion with a variety of artists who’ve written contemporary works riffing off “Moby-Dick,” including Elizabeth Doss, Melville’s great-great-great granddaughter who has written a play about his failure as commercial writer, “Poor Herman.”
Continuing the theme of diversity, “Melville in Our Seaport” also includes “Cuffe: Taxed,” a film about Paul Cuffe, the phenomenally successful 18th-century Westport and African/Native American entrepreneur and his battle for equal treatment under Massachusetts law.
This kind of summertime Melville event in New Bedford, when the tourists are here, can only get better as the author’s influence grows.
It may have taken a long time for Herman Melville to receive his due for the depth and breadth of the stories about humanity he sought to convey. But now that it is that time, New Bedford is going to play a big part in it.
It makes me think there is some sort of blessing stroking the memory of poor Herman Melville.The same laying on of hands seems to have come around for New Bedford and its relationship to the great author, too.
The Herman Melville statue will be dedicated at 11 a.m. on Friday, Aug. 14 at The Seamen’s Bethel. The Whaling Museum’s four-day “Melville in Our Seaport” begins on Thursday, Aug. 13. Consult the museum’s website for a complete listing of events.
My thanks to Robert K. Wallace, co-founder of the Melville Society’s Cultural Project; Amanda McMullen, executive director of The New Bedford Whaling Museum; sculptor Stefanie Rocknak; Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic ;and New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell for sharing their thoughts about Herman Melville with me in preparation for this column.
Jack Spillane is a news and opinion columnist for The New Bedford Light. You can reach Jack at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.
