Herman Melville’s Omoo was first published on this day in 1847. This was the second of Melville’s novels — a sequel to Typee and so a second “Peep at Polynesian Life.” Both books were popular, though both provoked criticism from those who thought them salacious, or too complimentary of the islanders and too critical of the white man.

"War being the greatest of evils, all its accessories necessarily partake of the same character."
--from "Omoo"

Source: http://www.todayinliterature.com/biogra…/herman.melville.asp

D.H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence visited Tahiti on his travels in search of somewhere non-British to live. In his "Critical Studies in Classic American Literature" (1923), Lawrence discusses Typee, Omoo (published on this day in 1847), and Herman Melville’s attraction to the South Seas:

"Never man instinctively hated human life, our human life, as we have it, more than Melville did. And never was a man so passionately filled with the sense of vastness and mystery of life which is non-human. He was mad to look over our horizons. Anywhere, anywhere out of our world. To get away. To get away, out!
To get away, out of our life. To cross a horizon into another life. No matter what life, so long as it is another life.
Away, away from humanity. To the sea. The naked salt, elemental sea. To go to sea, to escape humanity."

At the end of the chapter, Lawrence chastises Melville for coming back to prim New England, to be boxed in by family, career and a false civilization. The essay concludes with Lawrence admitting that he is talking as much about himself as Melville:

"Melville was, at the core, a mystic and an idealist.
Perhaps, so am I.
And he stuck to his ideal guns.
I abandon mine.
He was a mystic who raved because the old ideal guns shot havoc. The guns of the 'noble spirit'. Of 'ideal love'. I say, let the old guns rot.
Get new ones, and shoot straight."

Source: http://www.todayinliterature.com/biography/d.h.lawrence.asp

Today is the 197th anniversary of the birth of Herman Melville!

"And here Bartleby makes his home, sole spectator of a solitude which he has seen all populous- a sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage!"
--from "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853)

Everyman's Library

13小時 · 

Herman Melvill (sic) was born in New York City, New York on this day in 1819.

"'At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,' was his mildly cadaverous reply."
--from "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853) by Herman Melville

Herman Melville (1819-91) brought as much genius to the smaller-scale literary forms as he did to the full-blown novel: his poems and the short stories and novellas collected in this volume reveal a deftness and a delicacy of touch that is in some ways even more impressive than the massive, tectonic passions of Moby-Dick. In a story like "Bartleby, the Scrivener" -- one of the very few perfect representatives of the form in the English language -- he displayed an unflinching precision and insight and empathy in his depiction of the drastically alienated inner life of the title character. In "Benito Cereno," he addressed the great racial dilemmas of the nineteenth century with a profound, almost surreal imaginative clarity. And in Billy, Budd, Sailor, the masterpiece of his last years, he fused the knowledge and craft gained from a lifetime's magnificent work into a pure, stark, flawlessly composed tale of innocence betrayed and destroyed. Melville is justly honored for the epic sweep of his mind, but his lyricism, his skill in rendering the minute, the particular, the local, was equally sublime. MORE here: http://knopfdoubleday.com/…/113148/complete-shorter-fiction/

Everyman's Library