What does a present-day Southern writer make of Melville? Strangely enough, what first comes to mind is not the greatness of Moby-Dick or the strange, flawed originality of Billy Budd, but rather a certain chagrin and a sort of melancholy wonder.
What did it feel like, one wonders, to have written Moby-Dick, an experience which Melville called being broiled in hellfire, and which was surely a triumphant taking-on of hell and coming through? It was surely akin to the sense of triumph Dante felt emerging from his own inferno. But to write Moby-Dick, publish it, sell a few hundred copies, see it drop dead and go out of print, disappear apparently forever, and then to spend the last twenty years of one’s life as a customs inspector on the New York docks, so obscure and forgotten that a British critic visiting America couldn’t even find you—what did it feel like? And then at the end, to write Billy Budd again, as far as Melville was concerned, stillborn, unpublished, unread. What did that feel like? Was there a certain species of satisfaction in living the most ordinary life imaginable? Was it an exercise in obscurity like that of Bartleby the scrivener, riffling through the valises of rich folk returning from the grand tour and then going home to humble quarters?
But I confess to a certain chagrin. Why? Because there was not a single Melville—or anything close—in the entire antebellum South.
And where did
