Walter E. Bezanson

Bezanson was in the generation of scholars of the Melville revival who questioned the earlier view that Melville lost interest in writing in the 1850s when his fiction was poorly received. They showed that Melville turned to poetry, which formed the second half of his career.

Melville's epic poem, Clarel was hardly noticed by reviewers or the public when it was published in 1876. The poem is 18,000 lines long, full of now unfamiliar allusions, and the verse is "tight, gnarled, and rugged," says Melville's early biographer Newton Arvin, and much of it depends on complex allusions to the Bible, history, and geography, and its play of thought is "intricate, elusive, sometimes shadowy".[4] Melville's first biographers largely dismissed Clarel because they thought Melville ended his career in the 1850s when his novels were poorly received. Poetry, in that view, was a hobby, and Melville a genius neglected by crass society. Bezanson and his cohort of scholars in the Melville revival set out to disprove what they saw as this romantic view. Melville scholar and biographer Hershel Parker wrote that among the new generation Bezanson was the scholar who set out to understand Clarel "at a time when no one else alive could make sense of the whole thing. It is the only one of Melville's books that everyone who has now read it was able to read it only because of one person, Bezanson."[5]

Over several decades Bezanson found evidence and developed arguments that Melville based the character Vine on Nathaniel Hawthorne[6] In 1960, Bezanson published the results of his several decades of study in the Hendrick's House edition of Clarel, which included extensive notes and annotations. The Introduction is a history and critical study of the work. The review in New England Quarterly praised the edition, saying "Every now and again a book appears that is destined not only to modify previous criticism but also to stimulate renewed interest in a great man and a great work". The edition "rescues Melville from himself" for he made nothing easy for the reader.[7] Newton Arvin, reviewing it in Hudson Review wrote that the "long and searching Introduction" is the "most thorough and penetrating treatment Clarel has ever had."[8]

The 1991 Northwestern-Newberry edition incorporates the Hendrick's House notes along with later findings and prints Bezanson's Introduction intact.[5]

Bezanson's lengthy essay, "Moby-Dick as a Work of Art," delivered in 1951 as a talk at Oberlin College to mark the centennial of the American publication of Moby-Dick, was the first to treat Ishmael as what he called the "enfolding sensibility of the novel, the hand that writes the tales, the imagination through which all matters of the book pass." Most earlier critics had placed Ahab at the center of the work, assuming that Ishmael was merely narrating, rather than struggling with the events as he later recalled them. Bezanson saw two Ishmaels, an earlier Ishmael who witnessed the events, and Ishmael the later writer. The essay was reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick in 1961 and in following editions, which Hershel Parker calculated must be more copies than any other academic essay on Moby-Dick.[9] The article is widely cited.[10]

His essay "Moby-Dick: Document, Drama, Dream" further argued "It is the narrator who settles in to probe for understanding, summoning evidences from world culture in an effort to break through into meaning . . . . For Ishmael's struggle with how to tell his tale is under constant discussion, is itself one of the major themes of the book. A modern reader's fascination with Moby-Dick might well begin with attention to Ishmael's search for forms— a sermon, a dream, a comic set-piece, a midnight ballet, a meditation, and emblematic reading. It is as if finding a temporary form would in itself constitute one of those 'meanings' which Ishmael is always so portentously in search of. Also it is as if Ishmael would stop at nothing in his efforts to entertain, to show off, to perform."[11][12]

His essay "Melville: Uncommon Common Sailor" emphasized Melville's humor and ear for language, writing that his "comic flair no doubt began with temperament, nourished by youth and good health. But the nub of its style came right out of the fisheries, especially the sort of hangman's humor not unlike the black comedy bred by modern wars . . . . Given a temperamental bent toward humor (merely struggling for existence in the pre-Pacific writings), Melville found right here in the whaleboat the perfect incubator for his hyena laugh. It erupts in the sea books; it declines, or perhaps ascends, into subtler ironies in the later years."[13]