There was a quality of calm to Philip Young, teacher of literature. An active quiet. No flailing, no fancy strokes; he would settle quickly to the bottom of an issue, and from that vantage see. And he would invite you to join him.
Large clear eyes darting behind thick glasses, eyebrows shooting up. Soft, croaky voice. He would sit forward, tweed-clad elbows on the seminar table, hands clasped or fiddling with the pipe that was ever-present, never lit. (Sometimes he would point the bit for emphasis.)
His readings were thoughtful, layered, reasoned, acute. Grounded in wide knowledge, not just of American literature but of American life. The Midwest loomed large; his beloved New England larger. Beneath it all was a genuine humanism well-tempered -- by service in a World War, by family life, by other hazards of experience, one gathered. Deep of insight, sharp of wit, he was also gentle -- with authors, students. Not so much with careless fellow critics.
Most of these facets are present in Young's new -- and last -- book, The Private Melville, published posthumously by the Penn State Press in May 1993. "Phil gave us Hemingway," a colleague said, remembering past works at a coming-out party for the new volume. "He gave us Hawthorne. Now he has given us Melville."
In nine chiseled essays, Young illumines hidden aspects of the great author's life and work, "secrets" he sees as falling into three types: "family matters," "private jokes," and meanings buried so carefully they have remained a century and a half in the dark.
Young's approach is revealed in the comment that "full satisfaction with the story depends on the ability and willingness to indulge in a Biographical Heresy," anathema indeed to the New Critics of his generation. As he writes, ironically: "Everybody used to know that the significance of a literary work lies in the work itself; it does not matter who wrote it or when or under what conditions or why or with what intent. It must not be used for extraneous purposes, either, including . . . increased understanding of the author." Stuff and nonsense. Young consistently -- and convincingly -- reveals how life shapes text and text reveals life.
Thus the persistent shadow on these pages is that of the author's father, Allan Melvill, whose revered image was shattered by the revelations, after his death, first of the crooked business dealings that had ended in his bankruptcy, and then of an unacknowledged daughter, Melville's secret half-sister. For the author, this latter news, received at age 19, was a crushing blow that would be reflected in various fictional settings and characters for the length of his career. Like the protagonist of his dark autobiographical novel Pierre, Young writes, Melville "had as a boy idolized his pious father; like Pierre, he somewhat confused him with diety. For Pierre, destruction of belief in the one collapsed faith in both. As I worked along, this lasting trauma kept surfacing."
The other defining wound to Melville's fragile psyche was the utter and often cruel incomprehension that met publication of Moby-Dick in 1851, a response the critic Newton Arvin has called "the heaviest count in our literary annals against the American mind." (One prominent reviewer called Melville "clean daft," adding: "The sooner this author is put in ward the better.") The book cost Melville both his readership and his livelihood. "He was never the same as man or writer," Young writes.
Young's early chapters display a keenness for historical sleuthing, as he gathers evidence to elucidate the lives of that secret sister, one Ann Middleton Allen, and of another obscure female relative, a cousin whom he identifies as the model for the heroine of Pierre.
He then shifts focus to four of Melville's Berkshire tales, and "the 'hidden' Rabelaisian elements" beneath the respectable surfaces that allowed their publication in magazines like Putnam's Monthly. "The Lightning-Rod Man, under close inspection, becomes a ribald satire of a local Congregationalist bishop who had penned a scarifying treatise on the horrors of male onanism. In "The Tartarus of Maids," often dismissed as a literal-minded protest against industrial working conditions, Young uncovers a richness of "sexual symbolism of great originality, fully absorbed myth and allegory, [and] the resonant presence of Dante." "Tartarus," he writes, "is a secret masterpiece," its protomodernist symbols presaging Freud and Kafka. Finally, Young examines two fictions "so little understood that the meanings might as well be secret": Ahab's ferocious, lightning-streaked, God-blasting soliloquy at the heart of Moby-Dick, and the obscure final story "Daniel Orme."
Of Ahab's speech, often quoted, widely recognized as the "spiritual climax" of that leviathan of American novels but "seldom if ever explained," Young notes quietly: "Readers who have paid real attention should be wondering what has hit them." With a nod to Ahab the full-blown tragic hero, he plunges after another Ahab, "the extravagant cosmologist, conversant with large religions and forgotten heresy, along with more than a dozen gods, goddesses, and mythic beings." Among the gods that this Ahab "summons, defies, and worships" on the Pequod's storm-wrecked deck, Young finds, are those of Norse and Greek mythology, Old and New Testament, Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, Hinduism, and, last but far from least, "the first god a boy had known and the first he would outgrow," Allan Melvill.
At last, Young moves to "Daniel Orme," "the nearly unknown coda to all of Melville." Here, he argues, in a brief story of the last days of an old ex-seaman, the writer lays his own weary, tormented bones to rest, making "a profoundly resigned, quirky, but graceful and unembittered exit." Like Melville, who spent his last three decades in painful anonymity, the old sailor passes in silence and obscurity. "There is nothing left to destroy." Yet even here, as the tale ends, Young observes, there is the unmistakeable hint of some final private note that remains unsounded. "It is clear," he concludes, "that in death Orme/Melville had a secret he's still not telling."
Philip Young, Ph.D., was Evan Pugh professor of American Literature Emeritus. He was a member of the faculty of Penn State's department of English from 19xx until his death in 1991. The Private Melville was published in May 1993 by the Penn State Press, Suite C, Barbara Building, 820 North University Drive, University Park, PA 16802.